this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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Programming
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I definitely concur. Scientists often write functional but abominable code that follow no style-guide, no conventions, no rules, just "get'er dun" mentality. Short obfuscated variable names, enormous functions, no comments, no build instructions, no tests, no edge case handling, no modules, no separation of concerns, etc.
They often write the most job secure code on the planet.
I get it, it's because they come from a world of
f(h) = g(h) + i(h) -> assoc = 1or whatever. Maths, physics, biology, computer science, etc. all have the most obtuse, unvarnished, terse expressions ever. They aren't teachers (most professors have no didactic training whatsoever), nor do they write stuff that has to be understood by anybody outside of their field.Especially if people from that field become researchers, only their results and number of papers for their peers count. They spend most of their time getting grant money and under pressure to release something that passes peer review.
Their entire system is more about money than actually expanding our realm of understanding and they are caught up inside of that.
IMO, the most dangerous specimens to exit that system are mathematicians as they believe maths is the purest form of science (everything is maths after all), that they are smart, logical, and can solve anything. They treat software development as a practical application of their formulas and, in my experience, see it as beneath them to follow rules they consider superficial.
Code doesn't have to readable, it has to be correct, functional, and at best pure. It's why functional languages, especially Haskell, attract them so much. There are those of course who just want something that works and feel like they're in the rat race of research.
That's been my experience anyway with making code written by scientific minds production-ready (tested, maintainable, documented, functional, extendable). It's a task I actually do wish upon my worst enemies because I want them to suffer like I did.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
For real, though, I wish maths in general, in all fields, adopted the way things are written in programming.
So, instead of something like:
Just write it out:
And I mean, that's still a harmless formula. I've had to learn so many formulas, where not the formulas were the problem, rather it was knowing what φ means in this field/context. So many scientific papers are just extremely hard to read for anyone from a different field, because the formulas are obfuscated like that.
And the thing is, I get that pure mathematicians don't care. Their formula inputs usually truly don't have much of a meaning beyond
aandb.But their conventions, in particular multiplication being implied when two random letters are written next to each other, that just fucks up the option for anyone in any other field to use legible variable names.
You're absolutely correct, and in my experience authors with physics background are even worse.
I've seen algorithms that I know by heart, understand fully and have implemented tens of times represented in such a way that I can't even recognise them.