I'm lucky to be in a lab with enough funding for this. This is rarely the case. In medical science it's easy to get large grants and pay programmers in something like biology the programmer is usually that guy that learned perl since he's already getting paid to do science.
Grad students probably wrote the majority of the tools used in my lab and it shows because when they leave the knowledge of the different issues and bugs in the software that they had goes with them. Years later they resurface and no one has any idea of the thought process of the original author.
It's quite annoying. We have such a project right now that is a basic piece of software we use for all our research. There is no current funding for someone to sit there and clean up the code. Most funding agencies want new work not maintenance work to be done with their money. There just isn't any incentives anywhere for this.
Grad students probably wrote the majority of the tools used in my lab and it shows because when they leave the knowledge of the different issues and bugs in the software that they had goes with them. Years later they resurface and no one has any idea of the thought process of the original author.
It's quite annoying. We have such a project right now that is a basic piece of software we use for all our research. There is no current funding for someone to sit there and clean up the code. Most funding agencies want new work not maintenance work to be done with their money. There just isn't any incentives anywhere for this.
Someone will just reinvent the wheel probably.