It's a toss-up. On the one hand, there's a loss due to dirty code, but a gain by a smaller group of people being able to do multidisciplinary work. In my own case, I'm a physicist outside academia, and in addition to code, I also do electronics and a variety of other things.
When you're doing exploratory R&D, as I am, there are downsides to getting things done by domain specialists. First, you have to find people with quantitative skills, and they tend to be in the greatest demand due to scarcity. Second, you have to manage the politics of getting them assigned and engaged. Third, you have to manage the interface between specialties. It becomes a project management exercise. And then, the way that code and project files are structured, it may be possible to read isolated sections of code, but very hard for a non-expert to find their way around the myriad of files that tend to form a modern code base.
In my own case, I do what I can to write good code. I try to keep up to date on good practices, and so forth. Could we do better? Sure. The quest to improve my coding is how I accidentally bumped into HN in the first place.
Don't worry about these comments. The worst thing in science is usually that the code is not published (and these comments on code quality don't help).
As long as it's published, if somebody wants to reuse it, reimplementing from the paper is the hardest part.
It's a toss-up. On the one hand, there's a loss due to dirty code, but a gain by a smaller group of people being able to do multidisciplinary work. In my own case, I'm a physicist outside academia, and in addition to code, I also do electronics and a variety of other things.
When you're doing exploratory R&D, as I am, there are downsides to getting things done by domain specialists. First, you have to find people with quantitative skills, and they tend to be in the greatest demand due to scarcity. Second, you have to manage the politics of getting them assigned and engaged. Third, you have to manage the interface between specialties. It becomes a project management exercise. And then, the way that code and project files are structured, it may be possible to read isolated sections of code, but very hard for a non-expert to find their way around the myriad of files that tend to form a modern code base.
In my own case, I do what I can to write good code. I try to keep up to date on good practices, and so forth. Could we do better? Sure. The quest to improve my coding is how I accidentally bumped into HN in the first place.