The Shape of Code

In the commercial environment money makes the world go around, while in academia recognition (e.g., number of times your work is cited, being fawned over at conferences, impressive job titles) is the coin of the realm (there are a few odd balls who do it out of love for the subject or a desire to understand how things work, but modern academia is a large bureaucracy whose primary carrot is recognition).

There is an incentive problem for those writing software in academia; software does not attract much, if any, recognition.

Does the lack of recognition for writing software matter? Surely what counts are the research results, not the tools used to get there (be they writing software or doing mathematics).

A recent paper bemoans the lack of recognition for the development of Python packages for Astronomy researchers. Well, its too late now, they have written the software and everybody gets to make perfect copies for free.

What the authors of Astropy want, is for researchers who use this software to include a citation to it in any published papers. Do all 162 authors deserve equal credit? If a couple of people add a new package, should they get a separate citation? What if a new group of people take over maintenance, when should the citation switch over from the old authors/maintainers to the new ones? These are a couple of the thorny questions that need to be answered.

R is perhaps the most widely used academic developed software ecosystem. A small dedicated group of people has invested a lot of their time over many years to make something special. A lot more people have invested effort to create a wide variety of add-on packages.

The base R library includes the citation function, which returns the BibTeX information for a given package; ready to be added to a research papers work flow.

Both commercial and academic producers need to periodically create new versions to keep ahead of the competition, attract more customers and obtain income. While they both produce software to obtain ‘income’, commercial and academic software systems have different incentives when it comes to support for end users of the software.

Keeping existing customers happy is the way to get them to pay for upgrades and this means maintaining compatibility with what went before. Managers in commercial companies make sure that developers don’t break backwards compatibility (developers hate having to code around what went before and would love to throw it all away).

In the academic world it does not matter whether end users upgrade, as long as they cite the package, the version used is irrelevant; so there is a lot less pressure to keep backwards compatibility. Academics are supposed to create new stuff, they are researchers after all, so the incentives are pushing them to create brand new packages/systems to be seen as doing new stuff (and obtain a whole new round of citations). A good example is Hadley Wickham, who has created some great R packages, who seems to be continually moving on, e.g., reshape -> reshape2 -> tidyr (which is what any good academic is supposed to do).

The run-time performance of a system is something end users always complain about, but often get used to. The reason is invariably that there is little or no incentive to address this issue (for both commercial and academic systems). Microsoft Windows is slower than it need be and the R interpreter could go a lot faster (the design of the interpreter looks like something out of the 1980s; I’m seeing a lot of packages in R only, so the idea that R programs spend all their time executing in C/Fortran libraries may be out of date. Where is the incentive to use post-2000 designs?)

How many new versions of a software package can be produced before enough people stop being willing to pay for an update? How many different packages solving roughly the same problem can academics produce?

I don’t think producing new packages for income has a long term future.