> In an ideal world with enough resources, every lab would have technical staff to help with this process, but most researchers unfortunately don't have bandwidth to spend on this problem.
And they shoot themselves in the foot constantly by not prioritizing non-crappy software.
Then think it's normal that a new student needs months of close support before they can start doing anything interesting. They think it's normal to spend weeks trying to get bitrotted code running again, or just give up and throw it out losing months or years of hard-won incremental improvements.
I'm not even talking about supporting reproducibility by outsiders -- they can't even achieve reproducibility within their own labs, because they don't follow practices that are baseline in industry (version control, configuration management, standardized environments, etc).
> I'm not even talking about supporting reproducibility by outsiders -- they can't even achieve reproducibility within their own labs, because they don't follow practices that are baseline in industry (version control, configuration management, standardized environments, etc).
True that. Four years ago, when I was writing my thesis in computational physics, I attended a research group meetup. One session gathered all the students and had them showcase their research. When there was still some time left at the end, I asked the audience who was using version control systems for the programs they write, and only 5% or so raised their hands. I then immediately ran them through a Git tutorial, and people were amazed by what is possible.
Indeed, this is all too common and such a waste. I imagine it would help to have a manual of "modern" best practices for research--maybe this exists? A lot of non-CS researchers could benefit as well.
And they shoot themselves in the foot constantly by not prioritizing non-crappy software.
Then think it's normal that a new student needs months of close support before they can start doing anything interesting. They think it's normal to spend weeks trying to get bitrotted code running again, or just give up and throw it out losing months or years of hard-won incremental improvements.
I'm not even talking about supporting reproducibility by outsiders -- they can't even achieve reproducibility within their own labs, because they don't follow practices that are baseline in industry (version control, configuration management, standardized environments, etc).