> I've found that non-computer science researchers who program will dismiss all help with "it doesn't need to be run by anyone else",
I used to work with bioinformaticians, and often wasn't impressed by a lot of the code that they churned out. But to be fair a lot of the work was just to produce a one off graph / heatmap to prove or disprove something, so most of the time it wasn't so important.
> I can barely understand code I wrote 6 months ago and I've written plenty of Perl in the past, too. The idea that code should be so easily understood that to ask a question would make one seem inadequate strikes me as a fanciful dream.
This was a big learning experience for me. I wrote and maintained a Django based system for four and a half years. When I couldn't understand my own code a few months later it was time to refactor. Ask yourself why you don't understand it and how you would expect it to be if it was written in an easier to understand way. It will save you time in the long run. Ex-colleagues commented that they found my code / database design fairly logical after I had left that job.
I used to work with bioinformaticians, and often wasn't impressed by a lot of the code that they churned out. But to be fair a lot of the work was just to produce a one off graph / heatmap to prove or disprove something, so most of the time it wasn't so important.
> I can barely understand code I wrote 6 months ago and I've written plenty of Perl in the past, too. The idea that code should be so easily understood that to ask a question would make one seem inadequate strikes me as a fanciful dream.
This was a big learning experience for me. I wrote and maintained a Django based system for four and a half years. When I couldn't understand my own code a few months later it was time to refactor. Ask yourself why you don't understand it and how you would expect it to be if it was written in an easier to understand way. It will save you time in the long run. Ex-colleagues commented that they found my code / database design fairly logical after I had left that job.