The hard road to reproducibility

摘要

Early in my Ph.D. studies, my supervisor assigned me the task of running computer code written by a previous student who was graduated and gone. It was hell. I had to sort through many different versions of the code, saved in folders with a mysterious numbering scheme. There was no documentation and scarcely an explanatory comment in the code itself. It took me at least a year to run the code reliably, and more to get results that reproduced those in my predecessor's thesis. Now that I run my own lab, I make sure that my students don't have to go through that.