An often neglected force in this argument is that many practitioners of "scientific coding" take rapid iteration to its illogical and deleterious conclusion.
I'm often lightly chastised for my tendencies to write maintainable, documented, reusable code. People laugh guiltily when I ask them to try checking out an svn repository, let alone cloning a git repo. It's certain that in my field (ECE and CS) some people are very adamant about clean coding conventions, and we're definitely able to make an impact bringing people to use more high level languages and better documentation practices.
But that doesn't mean an hour goes by without seeing results reverse due to a bug buried deep into 10k lines of undocumented C or Perl or MATLAB full of single letter variables and negligible modularity.
An often neglected force in this argument is that many practitioners of "scientific coding" take rapid iteration to its illogical and deleterious conclusion.
I'm often lightly chastised for my tendencies to write maintainable, documented, reusable code. People laugh guiltily when I ask them to try checking out an svn repository, let alone cloning a git repo. It's certain that in my field (ECE and CS) some people are very adamant about clean coding conventions, and we're definitely able to make an impact bringing people to use more high level languages and better documentation practices.
But that doesn't mean an hour goes by without seeing results reverse due to a bug buried deep into 10k lines of undocumented C or Perl or MATLAB full of single letter variables and negligible modularity.