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There is no real incentive to organize and clean up the code, even if the scientists involved have the skills to write well-organized software. And organizing t

There is no real incentive to organize and clean up the code, even if the scientists involved have the skills to write well-organized software. And organizing this kind of code that often starts in a more exploratory way is a pretty large amount of additional effort. This kind of effort is simply not appreciated, and if spending time on it means you publish fewer papers it's a net negative for your career. I'd settle for just publishing the code at all, even if it is a tangled mess. This is still not all that common in the natural sciences, though I have a bit of hope this will change.

hnedeotes 6y ago
Yeah I mean, if your study is implying the apocalypse (or even if not, but more so if that's the case) you better put the code there, because that's what the scientific method requires, how should I believe your conclusions or and cute graphs if I can't see how you arrived at it? Maybe it was drawn in Narnia for all I know, maybe it has significant errors, or it's so tailored to produce those results that it's irrelevant. And if the tools and methods you used for arriving at them are so messy that you dare not publish them what does that tell me about: - your process; - the organisation of your ideas; - the conclusions or points made in the paper? I don't mean it has to be idiomatic well written code, but it should be readable enough to be followed.