[SciPy-User] peer review of scientific software

[Martin van Leeuwen]

I tend to think that we get less and less time on our sleeves as science
seems to become more competitive. But that being said, I don't think we
should respond by teaching students to forget about version control and
unit testing. If it isn't to support your own debugging efforts, it also
provides a handle for anyone attempting to use someone else's code.


2013/5/28 Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com>

> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > The question that always comes up is - why?   Most scientists trained
> > in the ad-hoc get-it-to-work model have a rather deep belief that this
> > model is more or less OK, and that doing all that version-control,
> > testing stuff is for programming types with lots of time on their
> > hands.  If we want to persuade those guys and gals, we have to come up
> > with something pretty compelling, and I don't think we have that yet.
> > I would love to see some really good data to show that we'd proceed
> > faster as scientists with more organized coding practice,
>
> I always make newbies read this:
>
> http://boscoh.com/protein/a-sign-a-flipped-structure-and-a-scientific-flameout-of-epic-proportions.html
> (Short version: basically someone's career being destroyed by a sign
> error in code written by some random person in the next lab.)
>
> Then I show them the magic of 'if __name__ == "__main__": import nose;
> nose.runmodule()'.
>
> Maybe it sinks in sometimes...
>
> I agree that while it's all very noble to talk about the benefit to
> science as a whole and the long term benefits of eating your
> vegetables and blah blah blah, the actually compelling reason to use
> VCS and test everything is that it always turns out to pay back the
> investment in, like, tens of minutes.
>
> Telling people about the benefits of regular exercise never works either.
>
> -n
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