Jacques Mattheij

Technology, Coding and Business

CS Paper writers, please show your code!

I love reading papers and books about computer science. Anything at all that I can learn from how to be better at my chosen profession (I’m still mostly a programmer, even if I do other stuff as well) is great.

That said, I have a handicap. It takes me an hour or more to get my head wrapped around a bunch of mathematical expressions, when I could probably digest the code in a few minutes. And invariably those papers describe some project for which you can pretty much know had a bunch of code written to verify the assumptions and to do the computations that are behind the data used to write the paper. But the code isn’t there.

True, this isn’t always the case, but more often than not, the paper stands in isolation with datasets and/or code unavailable.

Please, for me and other people like me (I have no idea how many there are) show your code, release your data. It would help to understand your papers and it might help to see your work validated and/or improved on without a lot of duplication of effort.