Sometimes the academic standard isn't realistic because software that large is often written by many people in different stages with little thought to architect

Sometimes the academic standard isn't realistic because software that large is often written by many people in different stages with little thought to architecture. Coupled with the fact that software design is so ambiguous (i.e. why you get papers with the title meme "considered harmful" to the n power for certain software practices) I don't blame people for being confused. For example, people can make legitimate cases for use of goto, continue, and break which academics consider bad practice because it interrupts program flow. My guess is the primary reason it had 10,000 global variables is because of lack of knowledge, but also lack of structure. And to restructure the code with that many pieces of global memory would probably require extensively rewriting. And I can't tell you how many articles I've read that tell you to never rewrite applications because it implies a death sentence for the company (ie. Netscape).