On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 03:56:07PM +0000, David Tweed wrote: > I think it's just a difference in when we'd use words like terrible.
Well, being on a suckless list, I tend to agree with suckless' definitions of "terrible". Perhaps all this could be elaborated from a different angle. Most of the people who write numerical software are respected hardcore academics in their fields. But most of these people are *not* programmers per se. I believe this is the general reason for the "sucks more" aspects of numerical software. Would you agree? As a personal anecdote: I was reading a good book about numerical computation the other day. Everything was nicely derived and all that. But when it came to the C library that the respected professor had developed, I couldn't but think: this is absolutely terrifying. I mean, the code examples violated practically every idiom of C; several functions took well over twenty parameters, numerous libc-functions were severely misused, the type system was a mess, and so on. - Jukka.
