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comment by temple
temple  ·  4077 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A farewell to bioinformatics

There's several examples that I know of that were the one-off prototype code written by the physicists that turned into production code. They were used for years but would take hours to run.

We look at it and fix it for them. Usually takes less than a week. Now, the codes now run in minutes instead of hours. That's a lot of wasted scientist time.

Though, I get that it's hard to get software engineers or computer scientists on the grants, anyways, because no one wants to pay for them, even if there is a large computational portion of the research.





thundara  ·  4077 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Though, I get that it's hard to get software engineers or computer scientists on the grants, anyways, because no one wants to pay for them, even if there is a large computational portion of the research.

Easy argument against it is that funds are spread paper thin already, and when you have to choose between a grant to optimize an already-built program and one to write a completely novel one, well, the choice is clear.

Now, if everyone wasn't spending every waking minute stressing about grants...but I don't think anyone will disagree with me that that's already a known and well documented problem. ;)

I personally think it would be worthwhile in the long run, economically, to add a short subject on good programming practices to conferences / workshops, but I'm not the one scheduling them.