Nature Article: Publish Your Scientific Code! Really?

Recently, Nick Barnes wrote a one page article in Nature encouraging scientist to publish their code pretty much as-is. He makes many good points especially ... if the results from your code are good enough to publish, then your code should be good enough to publish too.

My main concern is the possible unintended consequences that scientists will think they never need to improve their software developing skills since what they do is "good enough." When in reality, often, their skills are not good enough and that many scientists are publishing results that are not good enough due to the poor software they have developed. We do not want scientists to lose the sense of urgency to do a better job in writing good software that is a real scientific tool and that produces good science. Yes, I could see where once they publish their code and if peer review deems it flawed, or the like, that they might be embarrassed and want to do better.... but highly unlikely. Besides scientific software should be peered reviewed with code reviews and/or pair-programming just like any other type of software before results are published from it or the code is released to begin with.

Again, "Be a better scientific software developer today than yesterday!"