"The vast majority of economists are horrible programmers, however most know how to script in at least 1 language, and a small number of them are actually really good at scripting. An extremely small number of economists know they're way around at least 1 entire general purpose programming language."
As an economist whose hobby is the study of programming languages, you can imagine the frustration that I feel. What I have found works best is to make grad students use basic functional programming techniques. Everything they do is just a few lines long. As opposed to a 250-line heap of garbage with three nested for loops.
I'm sorry, but that it's a wasted emotion. Economists are not software developers. They do the minimal they need and nothing more. It's like complaining that a masseur has poor baking skills.
Get over it! It's a support tool for them and until they demand that you take their code as a perfect example, developed have no need to complain.
It's more like saying a masseur doesn't have a deep knowledge of anatomy. For most healthy people it wouldn't be an issue if the masseur just did what they were taught, but they'll consistently be suboptimal and will occasionally do some real damage. See the recent high profile errors with economists using excel.
When you have to review their code, you have a very good reason to care about what it looks like. I also feel that I have an obligation to do what I can to improve the accuracy of our research.
"They do the minimal they need and nothing more."
In other words, they work on their program until it runs to completion without throwing an error message.
As an economist whose hobby is the study of programming languages, you can imagine the frustration that I feel. What I have found works best is to make grad students use basic functional programming techniques. Everything they do is just a few lines long. As opposed to a 250-line heap of garbage with three nested for loops.