As a former scientist and now professional software developer I can confirm some of the observations of the article. This is because enterprise developers do premature flexibilization. And "Premature Flexibilization Is The Root of Whatever Evil Is Left", see
But on the other side, most scientific code I've seen, is simple (not by readability, but it uses simple abstractions), highly optimised and delivers irreproducible results.
Why? Because most scientist don't write any kind of test. Nobody teaches scientists test-driven development and most don't know about unit or integration test, so one can make sure, a program generate consistent results. Scientists are happy if a program runs on their machine and produces a nice graph for their paper. If you ever want to reproduce the results of a non-trivial scientific simulation, good luck. You will discover that the results will be highly dependent on the type and version of CPU, GPU, compiler, operating system, time zone, language, random generator seed, version of the programming language(s), versions of self-written libraries (which most often don't even have a version number), version of the build system (if one is used at all), etc... . And that's why you will never discover running scientific code outside of the scientists computer.
TLDR; Both (scientist and professional developers) can learn from each other.
http://product.hubspot.com/blog/bid/7271/premature-flexibili...
But on the other side, most scientific code I've seen, is simple (not by readability, but it uses simple abstractions), highly optimised and delivers irreproducible results.
Why? Because most scientist don't write any kind of test. Nobody teaches scientists test-driven development and most don't know about unit or integration test, so one can make sure, a program generate consistent results. Scientists are happy if a program runs on their machine and produces a nice graph for their paper. If you ever want to reproduce the results of a non-trivial scientific simulation, good luck. You will discover that the results will be highly dependent on the type and version of CPU, GPU, compiler, operating system, time zone, language, random generator seed, version of the programming language(s), versions of self-written libraries (which most often don't even have a version number), version of the build system (if one is used at all), etc... . And that's why you will never discover running scientific code outside of the scientists computer.
TLDR; Both (scientist and professional developers) can learn from each other.