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> it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism Anyone who programs publicly (via streaming, blogging, open source) opens themselves up for critici
by nomilk 5y ago
> it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism
Anyone who programs publicly (via streaming, blogging, open source) opens themselves up for criticism, and 90% of the time the criticism is extremely helpful (and the more brutally honest, the better).
I recall an Economist magazine author made their code public, and the top comments on here were about how awful the formatting was. The criticism wasn't unwarranted, and although harsh, would have helped the author improve. What wasn't stated in the comments is that by publishing their code, the author already placed themselves ahead of 95% of people in their position who wouldn't have had the courage to do so. In the long run, the author will get a lot better and much more confident (since they are at least more aware of any weaknesses).
I'd weigh up the benefits of constructive (and possibly a little unconstructive) criticism and the resulting steepening of your trajectory against whatever downsides you expect from giving away some of your competitive advantage.
- CJefferson 5y agoDo you really mean 90% of the criticism is extremely helpful? Or did you mean 90% was useless. I've published 100,000s of lines of code from my research over 20 years, and I think I've had exactly one useful comment from someone who wasn't a close collaborator I would have been sharing code with anyway. I still believe research code should be shared, but don't do it because you will get useful feedback.
- bagacrap 5y agoInteresting. Are the unhelpful comments coming from academics or random peanut gallery folks?
- CJefferson 5y agopeanut gallery are likely to give stupid feedback. Academics are likely to ask for help using my code -- which is nice but doesn't (usually) contribute anything useful to me, and takes up time I could be spending on other things.
- UncleMeat 5y agoPeanut gallery, in my experience. The number of people who I've never met before who decide to complain about hardcoded file paths or run a linter and tell me my paper must therefore be garbage is frustratingly high. This seems to depend on a paper getting a modest amount of media traction. That seems to set off the group of people who want to complain about code online.
- Helmut10001 5y agoI had the same experiences, but only publishing for 5 years so far. I still try to puplish everything openly, but I do not expect any responses anymore. In none of my papers, the reviewers appeared to have even seen the Jupyter Notebooks I attached as HTML. The papers are cited, some more, some less, but there is no reaction towards the source code. I still don't regret publishing it.
- bagacrap 5y agoThis. Feedback (less loaded term than "criticism") is something you should want. You can obviously ignore tabs vs spaces types of comments but if your code takes 2 months to get right then it probably still has bugs in it after 2 months and it would be a win if others started finding them for you. Also, if the style is really that bad then it could be obscuring bugs that would otherwise be easy to spot (missing braces, etc), and you might find bugs while fixing it up. ps always use an auto formatter/linter. I can't believe we ever used to live without them. So much time used to be wasted re-wrapping lines manually and we'd still get it wrong.
- goodpoint 5y ago> 90% of the time the criticism is extremely helpful Citation needed. I have rarely seen valuable feedback from random visitors from the internet.