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Do 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 2
by CJefferson 5y ago
Do 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.