I followed a Google+ link to an article that has just come out in Science magazine. The article is "Troubling Trends in Scientific Software Use" by Lucas Joppa and others ¹.

I did not find Joppa's article very satisfying, but there were some interesting references. For example (from Joppa et al):

From fields such as high-performance computing, we learn key insights and best practices for how to develop, standardize, and implement software (11)

Reference 11 is an article by Victor Basili and others on "Understanding the High-Performance-Computing Community" ². It is a thoughtful reflection on the experience of academic software engineers working with scientists using massively parallel computing. The message I took from the article was that scientists may have good reasons to reject suggestions from academic software engineers. This is often because the solutions are too general to be useful for a particular problem. The last sentence from the article is "We've much to learn from each other".

Another couple of sentences in the Joppa article led me to interesting places:

Reliance on personal recommendations and trust is a strategy with risks to science and scientist. "End-user developers" commonly create scientific software (17, 21, 22) ¹

Reference (22) is "A Software Chasm: Software Engineering and Scientific Computing" by Diane Kelley ³. Kelley also has some interesting thoughts on the separation of science and software engineering:

Creating the chasm

In a 1997 paper, Iris Vessey described a shift in computing philosophy that occurred in the late 1960s. She quoted George E. Forsyth, the ACM's president at that time, as stating that computer science was a field of its own, separate from the application domains. The result, as Vessey points out, was the insistence that anyone who wanted to be taken seriously in the field of computing, and software engineering, must develop domain-independent techniques, methods, and paradigms. The pressure was such that claims of broad applicability became commonplace. So, the bridge between software engineering and any application domain became a single massive structure that everyone had to use.

This is the relevant quote from Vessey (1997)⁴:

Then followed a debate, which endured for over a decade, that pitted academia against the computing profession. The notions of traditional computer scientists steeped in the notion of theory and the stigma of all things "applied" led to the following statement by George E. Forsyth, President of ACM, in 1965: "... the core of computer science has become and will remain a field of its own, ahead of, and separate from the application domain specialists." This philosophy led, not only to the creation of generic "solutions" to problems, but also to claims that any "creation" was applicable in all situations, because to state otherwise would have branded the creator as lacking in academic respectability.

I wonder if this separation has had a larger effect on our thinking than we recognize.

For example, our original NIPY grant application asked for salaries for two full-time programmers to help us apply software engineering methods to writing neuroimaging software. We did hire two programmers but we had given them an impossible job. To do a good job, they had to now become experts in a scientific field they did not know. Useful code and documentation had to be written so that other scientists in the field would find it easy to follow. To do this, you need to know the field. We scientists spend more time than we think working out how to talk to our colleagues. That experience is very hard to teach.

These articles gave me a new way to think about the false separation of "software" and "science". It is mysterious that we make this separation, because my whole experience tells me they are closely linked. I wonder whether we make this separation because we have come under the unconscious influence of the movement that Kelley and Vessey describe. It is easy to see how tempting it is. How easy life would be if we really could pay a programmer to write up our ideas as we sketch them airily on a white-board and retire to the garden, to think great thoughts.