Post #2733497

2025-02-04 15:17 UTC

@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt I think you're right to be cautious. The economics are so different. The quality practices that make sense for a long-lived code base maintained by many people may not pay off for a short-lived, single person effort. One way I think about quality practices is bringing natural consequences forward in time. So code reviews could be seen as bringing a later WTF moment to when it's easier to change. Might you be able to do that here?

Replies (2)

@waeiski@vis.social 2025-02-04 15:47

@williampietri@sfba.social @ngaylinn@tech.lgbt I agree. Code reviews are great for academic software that is going to be maintained and updated frequently, but for a selection of analysis scripts the purpose of which is to support transparency and reproducibility of a manuscript it might be overkill. Pylint or pyflake should be the standard in such cases.

Open ##2733502
@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt 2025-02-04 15:49

@williampietri@sfba.social Yeah, exactly! I think this will manifest in terms of quality standards. Are you planning to reuse this code, and need it to be maintainable? Will it be published along with the paper, so it needs to be readable? Or do you just want a sanity check that the outputs are correct? Personally, I think it's hard to verify correctness without readability and modularity, but I imagine some folks might resist this...

Open ##2733504