This reminds me of a recent popular quote: "The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down."
Can we comapre "Screwing around" to "Hacked together" (undocumented?) throw-away code and "Writing it down" to "Correctly written" (documented?) code?
Aren't you as a scientist supposed to also document what ideas failed?
Now it depends a bit on what you mean exactly by "hacked together" and "correctly written" I guess. I'm all for prototyping and getting to the "heart" of a problem quickly to confirm / reject ideas. But I wonder.
Do e.g. chemists feel they could try more experiments quicker if they didn't have to take notes on what they tried and what happened? Is there a comparable activity to hacking together throw-away code in chemistry (or other older fields of science)?
It is not a matter of not taking notes (code is notes), it is more a case of not writing code that handles all the edge cases, writing good comments, and most importantly taking the time to design the software and api's well. All of this is worth doing, but it takes a lot more time than just hacking together some code to test if an idea will work.
To answer your other question in science yes there is the equivalent of hacking something together just to see if the idea will work. It is very common to do a quick experiment to see if something will work before going back and doing all the controls and working out how robust the experimental conditions are. Science is hard and almost everything you do fails.
Can we comapre "Screwing around" to "Hacked together" (undocumented?) throw-away code and "Writing it down" to "Correctly written" (documented?) code?
Aren't you as a scientist supposed to also document what ideas failed?
Now it depends a bit on what you mean exactly by "hacked together" and "correctly written" I guess. I'm all for prototyping and getting to the "heart" of a problem quickly to confirm / reject ideas. But I wonder.
Do e.g. chemists feel they could try more experiments quicker if they didn't have to take notes on what they tried and what happened? Is there a comparable activity to hacking together throw-away code in chemistry (or other older fields of science)?