Marrying engineering rigor and scientific rigor for the planet (PROPL 2026)

Drawing on a decade spent bridging the Earth Science and open-source worlds, I argue that the Earth Science scientific community has much to steal from the computer science and engineering community — specifically, the concept of "rigor" broadly defined at the storage, compute, and science layers of the scientific software stack.

We have recently made progress toward increasing rigor at the storage layer with Icechunk, taking inspiration from transactional database systems. We still lack analysis libraries and idioms that make it easy to articulate simple, convenient, and correct expression of complex scientific ideas. We should be doing more to apply reliability and correctness approaches (e.g. property testing) in scientific software.

Talk by Deepak Cherian (Earthmover PBC) at the PROPL 2026 workshop at PLDI 2026 in Boulder, Colorado on 15th June 2026. Mirror of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3IdbQoAQxE.