Of more than academic interest – The Economist

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SOME programmers call it “spaghetti code”. Though error-strewn, it works—most of the time. It is likely to have been written in an out-of-date language, possibly more than one of them. It has grown by accretion, as different graduate students and postdocs, many long since departed to other institutions, have tweaked it, fixed it and patched it. And it is, of course, unannotated, so nobody really knows what is going on inside it.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Of more than academic interest”
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