Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:
"Travis" == Travis Oliphant <oliphant@ee.byu.edu> writes:
Travis> 1) Do you like the idea ?
I think this is a very good idea. Some people are likely to claim "nothing new in the particular implementation". However, you could insist that code contributed here should be unit tested and reasonably integration tested (how often do we see anything close to that in other papers?). It might be a good idea to have two kinds of contributions, "original/new ideas/algorithms/applications" and "new implementations". Most papers, it would appear, are read by a handful and used by an even smaller subset of the audience. The advantage of something contributed to SciPy is that it has (on the average) far greater utility to the whole community. Besides, I think it is reasonable to argue that good code usually takes as long as (if not longer than) writing a paper.
For comparison, here are excerpts from the JStatSoft submission instructions. http://www.jstatsoft.org/instructions.php """JSS will publish 1. Manuals, user's guides, and other forms of description of statistical software, together with the actual software in human-readable form (peer-reviewed) 2. Code snippets -- small code projects, any language (section editors Hornik and Koenker, peer-reviewed). 3. Special issues on topics in statistical computing (guest editors, peer-reviewed, by invitation only, suggestions welcome). 4. A yearly special issue documenting progress of major statistical software projects (section editor Rossini, by invitation only, suggestions welcome) . 5. Reviews of Books on statistical computing and software. (section editor Gentleman, by invitation only, suggestions welcome) . 6. Reviews and comparisons of statistical software (section editors Unwin and Hartman, by invitation only, suggestions welcome). The typical JSS paper will have a section explaining the statistical technique, a section explaining the code, a section with the actual code, and a section with examples. All sections will be made browsable as well as downloadable. The papers and code should be accessible to a broad community of practitioners, teachers, and researchers in the field of statistics. """ However: """If code does something standard (for instance compute an incomplete beta in Fortran) it is only acceptable if it is better than the alternatives. On the other hand, if it does an incomplete non-central beta in Xlisp-Stat, then it merely has to show that it works well. """ -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco