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What doesn't really get mentioned in the article, is that a lot of academic software was written by a single developer. All bigger software projects, academic o
by nirse 6y ago
What doesn't really get mentioned in the article, is that a lot of academic software was written by a single developer. All bigger software projects, academic or not, that were only built and maintained by a single person tends to become messier and messier with time. Perhaps most software suffers from that, that over time it becomes a mess, but having more developers look at code (and enough time, and many other factors) can certainly help to keep things in better shape.
- Robotbeat 6y agoPlus it becomes impossible to get multiple developers to work on the code if they can’t understand it because of its messiness, so there’s a bit of survivor’s bias and stronger motivation to clean the code up to be comprehensible to others when you have multiple people working on it. Also, I feel personally attacked by the headline. :) It is for this reason I try to keep my code and models pretty simple, only two or three pages of code (or ideally a single page), and I don’t try to do too many things with one program, and I choose implementations and algorithms that are simpler to implement to make concise code feasible (sometimes at the expense of speed or generality).