Re: Bug In Python Script May Have Affected Hundreds Of Studies

> > The upside: the script was made available with the study.
> > Lots of studies cannot be replicated due to data and/or
> > scripts/programs not being made available as well. Hence the "open
> > science" movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science).
>
> Yup. It seems so obvious to me (and to lots of others) that when you
> publish the results of scientific research, you have to make available
> notes, raw data and other stuff that would be necessary for others to
> replicate your results. This would have to include any essential
> processing software. Otherwise how can we trust them?

To people working with and on open source projects, this is second nature.

However, a lot of academics are not necessarily experts in programming
and other tools that they require in order to analyze data. I've
encountered it before that people didn't want other people to see
their "ugly" code (can't say that I'm proud of all the code that I've
written over the years!). In other instances, they don't like being
told that there is a bug. Admitting mistakes is hard, but reality is
that they happen. Rather than seeing it as criticism, it should be
viewed as encouragement to improve things. I mean, I'm well aware of
the fact that my (large) software projects still contain lots of bugs
and I'm glad when somebody stumbles upon one and reports it. :-)

> Here <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/15/bug_python_scripts/> is
> a further article, which includes a copy of the buggy function. How
> depressing is it that all it does is collect the items of a list,
> only to append them to another list ...

Oh dear... It was probably a fluke on their system back then that,
when they checked, the files got returned in a (seemingly?) ordered
fashion.

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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