Scientific Software Development Is Not an Oxymoron

Abstract

Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives writing, debugging, and maintaining software, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this effectively: after a couple of introductory courses, they are left to rediscover (or reinvent) the rest of programming on their own. The result? Most spend far too much time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are.'' -Greg Wilson The field of computational biology crosses the span between engineering and science-a surprisingly (to some) large gulf that typically is uncovered in the process of developing scientific software.