For those who are not in the computational fields: “my code is too complicated for you to get it” is not an acceptable excuse. It is the duty of everyone who releases code to document it – within the codebase or outside (or a combination of the two). Greater minds than Neil Ferguson (with all due respect) have a tough enough time navigating a large code base, and especially where you have collaborators, it is not unusual to need a second or two to remember what a particular function is doing or what the arguments should be like. Or, to put it more bluntly: for thirteen years, taxpayer funding from the MRC went to Ferguson and his team, and all it produced was code that violated one of the most fundamental precepts of good software development – intelligibility.
Read all of the essay by virologist Chris von Csefalvay here.
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