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To me at least sends a signal of people hiding stuff. That's not good. It made me distrust some papers in the past. I tried to reach out with no success.
> it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism Anyone who programs publicly (via streaming, blogging, open source) opens themselves up for criticism, and 90% of the time the criticism is extremely helpful (and the more brutally honest, the better). I recall an Economist magazine author made their code public, and the top comments on here were about how awful the formatting was. The criticism wasn't unwar…
Do you really mean 90% of the criticism is extremely helpful? Or did you mean 90% was useless. I've published 100,000s of lines of code from my research over 20 years, and I think I've had exactly one useful comment from someone who wasn't a close collaborator I would have been sharing code with anyway. I still believe research code should be shared, but don't do it because you will get useful feedback.
If the purpose is to push human knowledge forward, then it seems backwards not to publish everything.
Personally, I've found it difficult in my various careers to date when I've been put in positions where the actions that serve my immediate interests are in any way in conflict with my underlying principles or overarching goals. It's demotivating and deflating.
If I were in your position, I would publish everything and let myself feel pride in what I did. Even if we're all just insignificant specks in the grand scheme of things, pursuing a greater purpose can help make it feel like something matters.
Regardless of whether or not you release the code, you should do this.
It’s so common for people to think that cleaning/refactoring/documenting code is a waste of time, but it’s exactly the opposite.
The point at which the code is working, but not yet polished is exactly the prime “teachable moment” for improving your skills as a programmer and for refining your knowledge of the domain the program solves for. (This is true no matter how skilled or knowledgeable you already are).
Your brain is perfectly primed to do this now, so don’t let that go to waste.
That "competitive advantage" is just holding everyone back, slowing progress. This is particularly annoying to hear coming from "research" which I thought was supposed to be advancing the state of the art for the benefit of society. That's ostensibly the reason for publishing papers right, to disseminate knowledge? Or is it really just to increase ones ego and get paid?
Not saying you should publish code, just that deliberately keeping secrets in your field seems to go against what I thought you were doing.
If people want great code that runs easily and is easy to read, that's engineering work, built off the back of novel implementations.
If people want novel implementations that are likely rough around the corners and require a bit of finagling to run, leave that to the scientists.
One argument against publishing code is that maybe there's an error (or more) in your code, which validates your possibly mistaken theory, and forcing an independent reimplementation by others would uncover this problem.
It is better for science, it will be better for you and it will be better for people who want to play with your code.
Publishing is a form of advertising what you did, and helping others reproduce it makes it go viral and is a testament to how much they care. It can only help your career.
You’ll definitely get people who nitpick the code. This won’t hurt and it may even help in its own way.
I've posted a huge amount of academic code (I've linked to a small number at the end). I think you should, but it won't help advance your career immediately. However, I still think it's better for science. What is useful is if you can produce code people can build on and do their own cool stuff with -- then they will cite you. However, getting something to a state where it is tested for all reasonable inputs, has som…
My main concern would be to make sure there are no passwords or secret keys in the data, not how it looks.
You'll open yourself up for comments. They may be positive or negative. You'll only know how it pans out afterwards.
Is the code something that you'll want to improve on for further research? If so publish it on github. It opens the way for others to contribute and improve the code. Be sure to include a short readme that you welcome PRs for code cleanup, etc. That way you can turn comments criticizing your code into a request for collaboration. It'll really separates helpful people from drive by commenters.