I think "not scientifically novel" is probably not the right choice of 
words: engineering is "science", and I would include software engineering 
in this.  If it's not novel on the software engineering side, and not novel 
on the underlying algorithm, then what's the point of publishing a paper?

On Thursday, October 16, 2014 at 4:25:57 AM UTC+11, Isaiah wrote:
>
> If the work is "I translated Conventional Algorithm Foo into Julia" then 
>> it probably wouldn't be that interesting
>
>  
> There have been some pushes to create a peer-reviewed publication path for 
> software that is not necessarily scientifically novel. I'm not familiar 
> with any in computational physics, but in statistics there is the Journal 
> of Statistical Software, and in neuroscience/imaging there are things like 
> the Insight Journal and the "Frontiers in..." imprints which have 
> software-specific tracks.
>
> It is a difficult thing to evaluate though, because aside from the 
> labor-intensiveness and other general problems of software review, the 
> value of a scientific software contribution may only be obvious after 
> several years of refinement and organic growth. This has been a problem for 
> Julia and other software creators based in academia, when seeking grant 
> funding.
>
> On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 11:47 AM, Jiahao Chen <[email protected] 
> <javascript:>> wrote:
>
>> I second what Stefan and Erik have said. If the work is new and original 
>> regardless of its implementation in Julia, then just submit it to where you 
>> would ordinarily submit such work. If the work is "I translated 
>> Conventional Algorithm Foo into Julia" then it probably wouldn't be that 
>> interesting, unless possibly you demonstrate how your implementation makes 
>> special use of unique language features, in which case that could be 
>> highlighted as the main point of the work.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Jiahao Chen
>> Staff Research Scientist
>> MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
>>
>>
>

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