The Low Quality of Scientific Code

http://techblog.bozho.net/?p=1423

The general feeling is that scientific libraries have mostly bad code. I will not point fingers, but there are too many freshman mistakes – not considering thread-safety, cryptic, ugly and/or stringly-typed APIs, lack of type-safety, poorly named variables and methods, choosing bad/slow serialization formats, [b]writing debug messages to System.err (or out)[/b], lack of documentation, lack of tests.

Can someone tell me what's wrong with that? Implementing a -dflag and writing all the debug messages to stderr is not something a freshman would do.

Isn't that the first debugging technique most people learn?

Though that sort of code does tend to be written by self-taught programmers (or they may have taken an intro class), especially the cutting edge stuff since the researchers are the only ones who know the math.

wow fuck off with your blog spam

did you read about this on reddit or hackernews or something and suddenly its the most important thing

>>3
Could you please stop complaining about everything you see? Many links are posted here daily. I fail to see how this is spam.

On a side note, sage is not an insult and that's not how you don't bump a thread here.

I'm sure scientific code is nothing compared to the code written by mechanical engineers. My god the things I've seen them do.

Code written by cryptographers or people from a primarily pure mathematics background is also awful. It's all just dumped into one one-file-global-everything mess.

What should I study if I want to write quality code?

>>7
nginx

>>7
SICP

>>9
SICP has nothing to do with software engineering.

>>10

Agreed. Software engineering is all about OOP and SOLID. SICP doesn't teach OOP.

>>11

SICP doesn't teach OOP.

>>11 confirmed for not having read SICP.

>>12

not that OOP.

>>10
Exactly, SICP mentions nothing about the feminist movement. It's just patriarchal garbage.

*freezes >>46-san*

>>47
We use what we can.

*freezes >>48-san*

You've probably heard of "types" and maybe even "type systems" in your learning so far as a #c0d3r. For example, you've possibly heard that Ruby is strongly typed, while C is weakly typed

You've probably heard of "types" and maybe even "type systems" in your learning so far as a #c0d3r. For example, you've possibly heard that Ruby is strongly typed, while C is weakly typed

You've probably heard of "types" and maybe even "type systems" in your learning so far as a #c0d3r. For example, you've possibly heard that Ruby is strongly typed, while C is weakly typed

>>1

Scientific Community™ doesn't offer the Enterprise Quality Turnkey Solutions

discovering America, Columbus?

scientific studies typically operate at the boundary of the unknown and try out novel ideas. Typically, that requires a kind of rapid prototyping approach that is quite incompatible with solid, specification-driven software engineering, and the resulting code is essentially a proof of concept, nothing more.

>>17
No, I'm Leif Erikson and I'm discovering America.