Time to run my horrifying python code that builds a bash script that I use to repeatedly call some fortran code and make output I pull back into python for calculating telescope pointings.
My deepest apologies to everyone here who actually has training in making good software. I'm doing science!
(And no, I'm not looking for advice. Hilariously, this dumpster fire of code works well enough, and I don't need to improve it right now.)
@sundogplanets OK if this is like fesshole, I once wrote an R script that generated 1000 bash scripts which called each other in a chain to download and process stuff from a public repo.
@gwozniak I have hilariously detailed comments sprinkled throughout. Not sure anyone else could figure out what I was doing, but future me will (almost certainly) be able to!
@sundogplanets
To be fair, few researchers have software development training, so jank is expected.
On the other hand, you could argue that this is becoming as essential as, say, statistics, and should be taught as a core skill along your actual field of study.
@jannem I did try to take computer science way back when I was a baby undergrad scientist, but Caltech wanted us to start in Scheme so I ended up dropping the class... that's why my code is really awful now! I blame Caltech :)
@sundogplanets Just be glad the fortran code doesn't call some Forth routines which interrogate a clockwork device simulating Ha-dec pointing to do the conversion to az-el.
Yes, I observed on a radio telescope that did that. Went there once and found it went into slow slew mode for dec < 0 which meant it never went on source down in the South. "Fix that? You must be kidding. Just don't observe down there."
@sundogplanets No problem detected here. Sometimes it doesn't need to be seamlessly engineered, it just has to work "enough"!
Thinking of some prototyping I did where C++ code run in parallel on our cluster made an occasional system() call to ssh, to run an ML Python script on the one machine that had a big GPU 😅 It didn't generate Fortran, admittedly, but I'm sure I've some of that lying around, too! #science
@sundogplanets@VE2UWY
When making that mix, be careful not to get Forthon. The mix will be difficult enough without also having to use postfix notation.
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