I just found these comments from this Nature Editorial.
Their secret sauce appears to boil down to five ingredients: developers must possess sufficient proximity to and understanding of the research problem at hand; timing of the software release should correspond with the emergence of the problem in the research community that it addresses; software should have extensibility and interoperability; the algorithm implemented by the software should ideally be novel and indicative of profound insight; and, finally, a broad range of users should be able to run and operate the program.
Completely agree.
The underappreciation of computational science is manifest in several ways. First, developing a mathematical algorithm to answer a research question is seen as more intellectually valuable than developing a software implementation for a broad community of users (in fact, both sets of skills are needed, but rarely found in the same person).
Usually I hear the expression “code monkey” for trainees that are working on only in the implementation. But it is hard for whom is outside, to understand how hard is to build a good bioinformatics system.
Pih is All 