Hi Cameron.

For using software in science, unit testing can also be used to test the validity of the results. Andrew Clegg writes something interesting about this.

http://biotext.org.uk/on-the-importance-of-testing-in-research-software

There's a saying the Rails/Ruby community, if something is hard work you're not using enough shortcuts. Creating a dynamic interactive website with a database backend used to be hard work before Rails. Now Rails/Merb/Sinatra makes it easy.

I sound like a broken record, but a programming framework for science could provide easy shortcuts to scientific tasks, or make it easy for people to write a plugin to do so.