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I agree that academia produces its fare share of spaghetti code, but I don't think all of his arguments are correct. > writing software is a low status academi
by bjarneh 6y ago
I agree that academia produces its fare share of spaghetti code, but I don't think all of his arguments are correct.
> writing software is a low status academic activity
This is just not true. People like: Stallman, Knuth, Ritchie, Kernighan, Norvig or Torvalds are not considered as people of low status in the academic world.
Writing horrible spaghetti code in academia may be considered "low status"; but that's another story.
He should compare apples to apples. I.e. do people who work in academia write better or worse code there; compared to when they work for a business? I.e. they should be compared to themselves in different situations, not to some imaginary high coding standard that I've never seen anywhere.
In my own experience from academia at least I'd say that the lack of deadlines; the possibility to do whatever I want, plus the lack of management, creates much higher quality software in academia. When you work commercially, you will churn out embarrassing stuff just to make some stuff work before a deadline.
- pca006132 6y agoI think rather than low status academic activity, it is just not valued in the academia... The code is usually just the by-product of the paper, and higher quality code does not translate to higher quality paper. When your code works, you probably already developed the main part of your paper, and you would have no incentives to improve on your program if what you want is just publication... At least this is what I think.
- bjarneh 6y agoI've seen many research papers where all they disclose about the software is some pseudo code + some tables with timing results to prove their "performance gains". For those types of papers I agree with your statement. But in many academic scenarios others will want to inspect the source, and the quality of that code is certainly something that will add or subtract from your "status" in the academic world so to speak :-)
- pca006132 6y agoOK, perhaps I should read more papers :)
- abcc8 6y agoAgreed. Based on my lab experiences, it might have been more accurate for the author to write that often code is not being written by individuals who are the intellectual drivers of the lab. In many labs the 'thinkers' get far more credit and are more valued than the 'doers'.
- bjarneh 6y ago> In many labs the 'thinkers' get far more credit and are more valued than the 'doers' In terms of software this never made much sense to me. I would understand if we where talking chemistry or some other discipline where a "new idea" has to be investigated/verified by some "lab-rat" doing mundane tasks for 2 years. In that case the lab-rat would probably get less credit than the person with the actual idea, but this just does not apply to software. Developers are not doing mundane tasks on behalf of some great thinker.
- abcc8 6y agoRarely are the developers writing grants, generating hypotheses, planning experiments, composing manuscripts, presenting the lab's work, teaching at the university, etc. Perhaps my choice of words was poor, but this should be more clear.
- bjarneh 6y agoI guess this differs from place to place, but at my university (Oslo), we did all that..
- nirse 6y ago>> writing software is a low status academic activity > This is just not true. People like: Stallman, Knuth, Ritchie, Kernighan, Norvig or Torvalds are not considered as people of low status in the academic world. I understand the meaning of 'academic software developers' to mean 'software developers that assist in building software for other, non-CS, fields of research', but you only mention people famous within CS. I don't think this article is meant to apply to CS.
- bjarneh 6y agoYour probably correct, I just skimmed through the first section when I saw his bullet lists. I guess that's true for academia in general, i.e. they consider anything but their own field as a joke.