On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 8:18 AM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
> On 2 April 2011 14:20, Bill Hart <goodwillh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Please also bear in mind that many "upstream" developers have put
>> years of their life into research, development of algorithms and
>> coding. Many of them are professional mathematicians, not computer
>> scientists or professional programmers. They live and die by theorems,
>> grants, teaching, publications, etc., not language standards and may
>> only care if their code works for them and their immediate friends!
>> They very often do not have time to maintain it to the high standard
>> they might prefer, and their donation of their code is made on that
>> understanding.
>
>
> Fair enough, but I would hope the quality control in Sage would
> prevent poor code being merged in the first place. That does not seem
> to have been so, though I think the situation is improving somewhat.

I think the key point is that there are several metrics for judging
code. Some judge code by how many compiler warnings it produces, or
how standard-abiding it is. Others judge code by clarity of the
expressed algorithm(s). Yet others judge code by whether it works
correctly for their domain, or the sophistication of the algorithm, or
its speed. All of us weight these factors differently, and I don't
think anyone would consider any of these criteria bad, but we
shouldn't say code is bad because it doesn't satisfy only our choice
of metric.

> I would not expect to see code written by pilots controlling aircraft
> or code written by medical staff controlling medical equipment.
>
> OK, these are extreme cases, but happen to be two industries I have
> worked in (aeronautical and medical), though I have never had to write
> safety-critical software for either industry.
>
>> There's a fine line between critiquing/refereeing/improving code and
>> ridiculing it.

+1

- Robert

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