This would be horrifying. Maybe it could work in some fields, but not in mine (neuroscience). What, I'm going to use Java v.<whatever> on Ubuntu v.<whatever> because a funding agency tells me I have to?
I agree with much of your post, but not this bit.
edit: I think much of the professional insecurity of my field -- which feeds into the stuff you're complaining about -- is driven by the fact that way more grad student positions are funded than there are academic jobs. I wrote about this in more detail here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181
I think lutthorn's point above is on the money. Publish the algorithms, data, assumptions, and any other implementation-agnostic information required to reimplement, but don't bother with the actual code.
Successfully reimplementing the experiment on disparate platforms would liekly serve to support the findings even more. It might be more work up front for researchers to have to do the complete implementation in their preferred platform and then work out the kinks, but it might improve the actual science being done.
> I think lutthorn's point above is on the money. Publish the algorithms, data, assumptions, and any other implementation-agnostic information required to reimplement, but don't bother with the actual code.
If you don't publish the code and I come up with a different result while supposedly using the same algorithm, data, and assumptions, how do we know where a discrepancy between my results and yours comes from?
Note that if you're taking public money, the code isn't yours. It's the publics. Don't like that? Don't take public money. (If you work for Google, Facebook, etc, they own what you do on their dime - same deal here.)
This would be horrifying. Maybe it could work in some fields, but not in mine (neuroscience). What, I'm going to use Java v.<whatever> on Ubuntu v.<whatever> because a funding agency tells me I have to?
I agree with much of your post, but not this bit.
edit: I think much of the professional insecurity of my field -- which feeds into the stuff you're complaining about -- is driven by the fact that way more grad student positions are funded than there are academic jobs. I wrote about this in more detail here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181