Over the course of my career, I've had the job of working with environmental models of lake ecosystems, aided environmental/civil engineers in debugging the the

Over the course of my career, I've had the job of working with environmental models of lake ecosystems, aided environmental/civil engineers in debugging the then state-of-the-art flood water analysis programs, given (brief) guidance to Ph.D. graduate engineering students on the programing for their dissertations, and worked with mechanical engineers that insisted on doing the real-time machine control programming themselves because the software guys took too long. In each case, the people being given responsibility for the programs where in way over their heads. They were smart and educated and generally viewed programming as a skill somewhat akin to typing, something anyone could learn to do adequately, if not quickly, in a few days of practice. The ecosystem simulation made unnecessary oversimplifications (assuming that an exponential relationship could be modeled as a linear one because the engineers didn't know how to handle the integration of an exponential(!!!) and how that should be handled in a program). The flood control modeling program, used by the Federal government, was some of the worst code I had ever seen. It was written in a fashion where variables were treated a bit like a small finite set of registers. Ten or twelve global variables in the program were reused over and over for different purposes, sometimes to return computed answers, sometimes as temporaries inside of some function, and sometimes as iteration counters. It was a complete mess. A graduate student that had never learned C or C++ was being given a previous grad student's C++ simulation code to use as the basis for his dissertation work. That code was pretty useless and poorly documented. Software engineering principles played no part in the work these students were doing, they were from a different discipline. In the case of the real time machine control, programs were written in thousands of lines of assembly code and would control perhaps a dozen asynchronous activities though a combination of interrupt handlers, polling loops, and time outs. They were frustrated that the machines would simply hang every day or two. What a mess.