Re: Let me guess, that last one was an academic?
I actually quite like numrical recipes at least the numerical parts but the code style is awful, not least in the use of single letter variable names starting with a and working through the alphabet as if the length of variable name was related to efficiency or memory usage.
The attitude of mind was illustrated when I tried to compile the code that goes with the book on a unix system. The numerical recipes code had a function called 'select'. This caused a lot of header file/linking issues with the completely unrelated POSIX call of the same name. Anyway after working around the issue I sent a nice e-mail describing the problems and suggesting that in time they modified all of the function names by adding a prefix to make the names unique or at least much less likely to conflict. The reply was that they considered the problem a bug in the OS I was using and they had no intention of changing!
Maybe not an example of awful coding but an example of an awful attitude.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
