I work at a scientific institution where scientific programming is our bread and butter (www.ucar.edu) and has been for decades. There are people here who are t

I work at a scientific institution where scientific programming is our bread and butter (www.ucar.edu) and has been for decades. There are people here who are trying to make progress in the culture clash that Yossi describes. In particular, the UCAR Software Engineering Assembly holds an annual conference to tackle some of these thorny problems. This year's conference is over https://sea.ucar.edu/conference/2014 https://sea.ucar.edu/conference/2014, but hopefully it will be back next year. The conference had sections on best practices and software carpentry. Also, I am seeing a sea change where young scientist fresh out of grad school are actually pretty good programmers making traditional software developers (with little hard science background) somewhat obsolete.