Fwd: Paper on Best Practices for Scientific Computing

[Stijn Calders]

Dear all,

I found this blog post on Astropython very interesting:

There is a very nice paper that showed up on arXiv.org recently. This is well worth reading, either for yourself or as the basis for introducing these topics to your colleagues.

Best Practices for Scientific Computing

Aruliah, et al. Oct. 2012

Scientists spend an increasing amount of time building and using software. However, most scientists are never taught how to do this efficiently. As a result, many are unaware of tools and practices that would allow them to write more reliable and maintainable code with less effort. We describe a set of best practices for scientific software development that have solid foundations in research and experience, and that improve scientists' productivity and the reliability of their software.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.0530

Best regards,
Stijn Calders.

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Stijn Calders
Services and Operations: Space Weather

Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB)
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[Frédéric Clette]

Excellent advices.

I am just implementing such improvements right now to our sunspot index processing software. This heritage software would get almost a 0/10 note regarding all recommandations in the paper you mention. I am now aiming at 8/10.

Some of the advices in the paper apply mainly for large software sets and libraries and would be too heavy (e.g. in terms of learning "specialty" tools) for many cases where the volume of code is more manageable.

Frédéric