The dissent from Roger Peng hits close to home for me:
“One worry I have is that, with reviews like this, scientists will be even more discouraged from publishing their code,” says biostatistician Roger Peng at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “We need to get more code out there, not improve how it looks.”
Many of my peers (especially those from other cultures) are very much afraid of releasing their code because they are ashamed of it. They need a lot of encouragement in order to build their confidence enough to release their code (which I try to provide with irregular code reviews). Because of this, I can definitely sympathize with the reasoning that a greater emphasis on the quality of code from published research would make more of us afraid to release it. Particularly since I believe reproducibility is a more important goal than code quality for published research. (Of course, the two are related, though!)
On the bright side, my peers have been happy to entertain my code reviews. Maybe because they trust me.
(N.B. For context, I’m a part of the computational biology community.)
…if code review is done only at the end of work, it becomes another hurdle for scientists to get over in order to publish their research
I agree with the dissent as well. If code review is only done before publishing, scientists will see it as a burden, and more importantly, as a threat. After months of work, a single incorrect line of code could be the undoing of an entire project. Instead, I think we should focus on starting the code review as early as possible, so that bugs and problems can be found sooner rather than later.
The dissent from Roger Peng hits close to home for me:
Many of my peers (especially those from other cultures) are very much afraid of releasing their code because they are ashamed of it. They need a lot of encouragement in order to build their confidence enough to release their code (which I try to provide with irregular code reviews). Because of this, I can definitely sympathize with the reasoning that a greater emphasis on the quality of code from published research would make more of us afraid to release it. Particularly since I believe reproducibility is a more important goal than code quality for published research. (Of course, the two are related, though!)
On the bright side, my peers have been happy to entertain my code reviews. Maybe because they trust me.
(N.B. For context, I’m a part of the computational biology community.)
I agree with the dissent as well. If code review is only done before publishing, scientists will see it as a burden, and more importantly, as a threat. After months of work, a single incorrect line of code could be the undoing of an entire project. Instead, I think we should focus on starting the code review as early as possible, so that bugs and problems can be found sooner rather than later.