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Science Needs a Software Upgrade
When it comes to code, many scientists lack rigor. That carelessness could have disastrous effects on our ability to achieve reliable breakthroughs in a range of fields.
Science is messy. That’s why there’s some truth to the cliché of the scatterbrained professor. Not all scientists are like that, of course, but new theories and ideas are often birthed from downright chaos.
At the same time, many scientists are very clean and diligent when it comes to everyday tasks like keeping their desks tidy or their email inboxes uncluttered. This may sound paradoxical, but it really isn’t. All that mental mess needs to be managed somehow, and orderliness is a good strategy for keeping it contained within clear boundaries.
They set those boundaries by insisting on tidiness for anything that’s related to, but not directly part of, the mess that is science. That includes emails or the classes they teach, but also the experimental apparatuses they employ and any other tools they’re using.
It seems self-evident that this dogma of cleanliness should also apply to the software they write. That, however, is not the case. In particle physics and cosmology, where I work, messy code exists wherever you look. It’s usually…
