I wonder whether there’d be any good way to encourage people to use more inspection-friendly code, e.g. in R, Matlab or even better Python/numpy/scipy. I wish that science journals would accept/encourage source code appendices to articles or at least prominent links to online source code, and that such code, ideally clearly organized and commented, were as expected for “serious” articles as bibliographies are currently.
Even many papers in computer sciencey topics leave out critical implementation steps in describing algorithms and approaches; even a mediocre implementation makes the authors assumptions’ and precise meanings much more explicit. Often (though not always) code is as readable or more readable than mathematical formulae.
Even many papers in computer sciencey topics leave out critical implementation steps in describing algorithms and approaches; even a mediocre implementation makes the authors assumptions’ and precise meanings much more explicit. Often (though not always) code is as readable or more readable than mathematical formulae.