[bip] Bioinformatics Programming Language Shootout, Python performance poopoo'd

[Paulo Nuin]

Andrew Dalke wrote:
> On Feb 8, 2008, at 7:40 PM, Paulo Nuin wrote:
>   
>> I don't think they would accept to withdraw the paper, especially  
>> after
>> being reviewed and accepted by the editor.
>>     
>
> I'm not calling for a withdrawal.  This paper correctly reports their  
> results.  That those results are only applicable to the one  
> programmer who wrote the program just means that the paper isn't  
> useful and easily liable to misinterpretation.
>   
Agreed, that's why I don't think asking for a withdrawal would be too 
much. The "best" way would be to write a similar paper with identical 
methodology and motivation, pointing out where this one fails. Do I 
think it is a lot of work to write new code in different languages? Yes 
it is, but at the same it opens space to call good programmers in each 
language to write the algorithms.

(the paper correctly reports their results, but there is no way or form 
to reproduce them)
>> I believe not testing programs is quite common in peer-reviewing as
>> I had papers rejected that the reviewers never touched the software/ 
>> code.
>>     
>
> Sad but true.  Most people don't like to dig into someone else's code :)
>   
Indeed.

Paulo