Astrophysics Source Code Library
ascl.net73 points by SiempreViernes 20 hours ago
73 points by SiempreViernes 20 hours ago
<rant>
"Code" and "data" are mass nouns, and have been for decades. You don't say "pass the salts", and you shouldn't say "the codes are" or "the data are" either.
</rant>
That said, I love how open the astronomy community is with their code and data. I wish other fields would follow their lead, but given the incentive structure, they probably won't.
Data is the plural of datum so using the verb in the plural is arguably not wrong. I wouldn't use it like that but I think in certain Englishes it's acceptable (British?). Some mass singular nouns in British English idiomatically take plural verbs as well, e.g. the police are.
It was arguably correct when we had such a small quantity of data that it made sense to _count_ it rather than _measure_ it. But those days are long gone.
If no one had ever seen more than a dozen grains of sand, it would makes sense to count them and say things like "Sue just showed me her awesome gem collection; she has a diamond, two rubies, and three sands!" But when you are ordering sand by the truck load, that starts sounding really stupid, and you need to shift to measuring it ("sixteen tons of sand") and not counting it ("four million trillion sands").
Mass nouns are measured by giving a quantifier and a unit (three bytes, 64 kilobytes) and do not partake of the singular/plural distinction, which only applies to count nouns.
The British / American distinction is actually easier to explain by saying that they don't partake in the "unitary collective" shorthand; the British parliament are a (countable) collection of politicians, while the US Congress is an undifferentiated mass of...something. The Jury is (are) still out which of these best captures the semantic situation, whereas with code and data we are well past the point where talking about an individual code or datum sounds about like talking about a water or an air.
There are quite a few open source projects in astronomy, but in my experience there is a tremendous amount of code that is squirrelled away as it is difficult to reproduce and entrenches peoples positions. I have mixed feelings about this in general, as I understand the incentive structures, but I do wish in general some of the sub fields were a bit more open. I do think things are getting better in general.
Also I fully agree with the "codes" rant.
Source: working professionally in the field for 4 years.
> That said, I love how open the astronomy community is with their code and data. I wish other fields would follow their lead, but given the incentive structure, they probably won't.
CERN also provide a lot of open physics data from various experiments and is keep adding large amount each year [1]. Of course this still a needle in the haystack but still more than any individual researcher can ever process.
“codes” predates “code (plural)” by a long margin. HPC communities still get it right.
"Predates" doesn't mean it's still correct or even reasonable. There are all sorts of words and phrases that made perfect sense before we gained familiarity with a new technology (e.g. "horseless carriage") that sound dated once we learn to see it on it's own terms.
Hey, if you are going to use "have been for decades" a argument for the correctness of your position it looks pretty silly to get salty when a greybeard shows up and shares the deep lore.
I clicked through at least 20 different repositories expecting lots of MATLAB code, but to my surprise, I didn't find a single .m file. I hate how MATLAB is so popular in the DSP world and it makes me happy to see that the astronomy community has not been infiltrated by Mathworks (yet).
You are more likely to come across FORTRAN77 codes on ASCL than matlab.
I love astrophysics but this site is excruciating difficult to search unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. No groupings or tagging, categories, or anything to help you find similar “codes” to an area of interest.
The point of ASCL is around providing a citable reference to the code, independent of the various places it could appear, with minimal effort from researchers. Given it's indexed by NASA ADS, there doesn't seem to be much value in duplicating effort around search, especially when people will go to NASA ADS first anyway.