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edited Jun 11, 2014 at 18:34

I think an issue that is related to that raised by Piotr (+1) which is that research funding is not generally available to cover the costs of producing highly reliable portable code or the costs of maintaining/supporting code produced to "research quality". I have found this to be a significant issue when trying to use code released by other researchers in my field,field; all too often I can't get their code to work because it uses some third party library that is no longer available, or that only works on a Windows PC, or which no longer works on my version of the software because it uses some deprecated feature of the language/environment. The only way to get around this is to re-implement the routines from the third party library so that all of the code is provided as a single monolithic program. But who has the time to do that in an underfunded "publish or perish" environment.?

If society wants high quality code to accompany every paper, then society needs to make funds available so that good software engineers can write it and maintain it. I agree this would be a good thing, but it doesn't come at zero cost.

I think an issue that is related to that raised by Piotr (+1) which is that research funding is not generally available to cover the costs of producing highly reliable portable code or the costs of maintaining/supporting code produced to "research quality". I have found this to be a significant issue when trying to use code released by other researchers in my field, all too often I can't get their code to work because it uses some third party library that is no longer available, or that only works on a Windows PC, or which no longer works on my version of the software because it uses some deprecated feature of the language/environment. The only way to get around this is to re-implement the routines from the third party library so that all of the code is provided as a single monolithic program. But who has the time to do that in an underfunded "publish or perish" environment.

I think an issue that is related to that raised by Piotr (+1) which is that research funding is not generally available to cover the costs of producing highly reliable portable code or the costs of maintaining/supporting code produced to "research quality". I have found this to be a significant issue when trying to use code released by other researchers in my field; all too often I can't get their code to work because it uses some third party library that is no longer available, or that only works on a Windows PC, or which no longer works on my version of the software because it uses some deprecated feature of the language/environment. The only way to get around this is to re-implement the routines from the third party library so that all of the code is provided as a single monolithic program. But who has the time to do that in an underfunded "publish or perish" environment?

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created Jun 11, 2014 at 18:29

Dikran Marsupial

I think an issue that is related to that raised by Piotr (+1) which is that research funding is not generally available to cover the costs of producing highly reliable portable code or the costs of maintaining/supporting code produced to "research quality". I have found this to be a significant issue when trying to use code released by other researchers in my field, all too often I can't get their code to work because it uses some third party library that is no longer available, or that only works on a Windows PC, or which no longer works on my version of the software because it uses some deprecated feature of the language/environment. The only way to get around this is to re-implement the routines from the third party library so that all of the code is provided as a single monolithic program. But who has the time to do that in an underfunded "publish or perish" environment.