Earlier quoted context omitted.
Epidemiologists are professional software engineers, in the sense that they are paid full time to write code and summarise the output in papers. They might not be "professional" in the sense of the quality of their work but let's not kid ourselves that these people spend half their days in the lab or taking swabs from children in Beijing. Other types of researchers do that - these guys just run sims.
Academia is geared towards paper publishing, so why would they bother with code quality? Even if in the long run it would benefit them, its at best a nice to have. Most academia doesn't share code or data anyway. It's like saying that programmers are professional English writers, so comments and such should be written in perfect English. IMHO the only valid criticism is if the the simulation modelling is sound and im…
> IMHO the only valid criticism is if the the simulation modelling is sound and implemented accurately.
I think the best way to tell if it is sound and implemented accurately is to first require that it is implemented as simply (to understand) as it can be. Even then, it is hard to reason about code. But without simplicity, the problem is ten times worse.
I'm tempted to go further and say that source code is formalized thought. I've written a number of simulators in the past, sometimes purely to help me understand a system more fully. There's something beautiful about describing the behaviour of a system in elegant code. When there's nothing left to remove I get much greater confidence that I've fully groked the system. I'd say this is the area where the "computers are like a bicycle for the mind" quote is the most true.