Ulp. As a scientist who is a hobby "programmer", this struck close to home. I've got one project[1] with a huge mess of functions calling each other. It started out with good intentions, but then gradually descended as I wrote more and more hacks to add new analyses & robustness checks. I swear I meant well!

I think there's a genuine tension between writing good code and "shipping" a paper. At least, when I program "as a programmer" I think my code is mostly higher quality.

[1] https://github.com/hughjonesd/why-natural-selection/blob/mas...