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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 25 years in the industry here. As I said there’s nothing against learning something new but I doubt it’s as easy as “leveling up”.

    Both fields profit a lot from experience and it’s as much gain for a scientist do become a software dev as an architect becoming a carpenter. It’s simply not productive.

    there is so much time lost in research institutes because of shoddy programming

    Well, that’s the way it is. Scientific code and production code have different requirements. To me that sounds like “that machine prototype is inefficient - just skip the prototype next time and build the real thing right away.”


  • It’s always good to learn new stuff but in terms of productivity: Don’t attempt to be a programmer. Rather attempt to write better research code (clean up code, revision control, better commenting, maybe testing…)

    Rather try to improve cooperation with programmers, if necessary. Close cooperation, asking stupid questions instead of making assumptions etc. makes the process easy for both of you.

    Also don’t be afraid to consult different programmers since beyond a certain level, experience and expertise in programming is vastly fragmented.

    Experienced programmers mostly suck on your field and vice versa and that’s a good thing.


  • Consequence:

    Software can only be good, when enough people WANT to work on it and with it along the complete life-cycle. There’s a critical amount of developers/contributors/testers and (feedback providing) users.

    Hence a lot of critical consumer stuff is based on popular opensource.

    Also, we’re entering an aera where the difference between hardware/firmware/software gets increasingly blurred. So all of this applies to more and more hardware, too.




  • I find too verbose comments less annoying than no comments.

    Try to describe the bigger picture. Good comments allow understanding the current portion of the code without reading other code.

    Also add comments later if you find yourself having to read other code to understand the code you’re currently looking at.

    Comments are also a good place to write out abrevations/acronyms.

    Never optimize for sourcecode size.








  • I’m no expert either but I never got the idea of a new universe popping up everytime. Do other universes also cause popups of new universes or just ours? That’d escalate quickly :-)

    I thought it goes that there’s already infinite universes existing from the big bang on. Otherwise universes would be created without big bang. (The new universe would just pop up and you’d still believe it was created by the big bang but there never was one)

    Also I’m not sure if laws of thermodynamics had to span accross universes. Take two theoretical perfect vacuum/radiation sealed boxes you put an energy source into. There’s no way to communicate between boxes. Each box had it’s own entropy and state of energy. Both would obey the laws of physics while being separate “systems”.

    That thought experiment wouldn’t work, if new boxes had to pop up if one of the boxes wanted to.