Really interesting take, very much in line with my experience that scientific code is often broken from a software engineering point of view. Science benefits g

Really interesting take, very much in line with my experience that scientific code is often broken from a software engineering point of view. Science benefits greatly from using more standard toolkits in open languages instead of proprietary code of any sort. This way the kind of reproducibility the author talks about would be easier to evaluate. That said, it's often hard in practice. I remember asking a colleague why they were so matlab-heavy when nothing they did couldn't be done in say, python. Their response was that all the previous code in the lab was written in Matlab, so re-writing and re-engineering it would be a huge and somewhat fruitless undertaking. You don't get publications from refactoring. Globally though I think science is heading in the right direction, big fan of efforts like Software Carpentry (http://software-carpentry.org/ http://software-carpentry.org/).