[Jeriko]

There is a ton of programming in research, and almost all academic code is written by the researchers, whether they are in biology, physics, humanities, whatever. This has some of the drawbacks you mention, but the solution is not so obvious.

First, almost all academic code is really simple from a software engineering perspective, but really complex from a subject matter perspective. Having a deep understanding of both the data and the relevant hypotheses is critical, and is often actually helped by writing the code yourself. Trying to communicate every feature requirement perfectly, and making sure every assumption is met, to a third party CS person might be possible but is definitely non-trivial.

Second, most of these projects are one-time use (code up some project over a few months, write a paper, never touch again), and so spending a ton of time + money making it robust and efficient is not really worth it. For things like open source tools that are expected to be used by a lot of people it's much more feasible to get engineers involved. The Chan Zuckerberg initiative is actually funding a program that essentially does this [1].

[1]https://chanzuckerberg.com/rfa/essential-open-source-softwar...

[tgvaughan]

It's kinda funny that this isn't widely appreciated. It used to be that research programs were most programs. Use of computers for other things was a kind of spin-off technology. (Now it's the other way around, of course.)