I agree with the feelings of the author, most software is overengineered (including most of my software). That being said, most scientific code I've encountere

I agree with the feelings of the author, most software is overengineered (including most of my software). That being said, most scientific code I've encountered doesn't compile/run. It ran once at some point, it produced results, it worked for the authors and published a paper. The goal for that code was satisfied and than that code somehow rusted out (doesn't work with other compilers, hadn't properly documented how it gets build, unclear what dependencies were used, dependencies were preprocessed at some point and you can't find the preprocessed versions anywhere to reproduce the code, has hardcoded data files which are not in the published repos etc.). I wouldn't use THAT as my compass on how to write higher quality code.