I think the comment is implicit: bad code leads to wrong code. Or rather: with bad code, how can you tell either way?
> In this sense, the sins of the scientific programmer might actually be important
No, you’re turning facts on their head: “fail early”, as described by you, is not a “sin”, on the contrary, it’s a hallmark of good software engineering [1]. Of course a nicely formatted error message is preferred to a coredump, but the end result is similar. But that’s not what (a lot of) bad scientific code does. Instead, it veers into the realm of undefined or unpredictable behaviour by failing to recognise the existence of a problem.
> In this sense, the sins of the scientific programmer might actually be important
No, you’re turning facts on their head: “fail early”, as described by you, is not a “sin”, on the contrary, it’s a hallmark of good software engineering [1]. Of course a nicely formatted error message is preferred to a coredump, but the end result is similar. But that’s not what (a lot of) bad scientific code does. Instead, it veers into the realm of undefined or unpredictable behaviour by failing to recognise the existence of a problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-fast