It's not quite as crazy as it sounds. It was a case of laziness and a belief that he was smarter than the compiler, rather than a lack of knowledge of basic flo

It's not quite as crazy as it sounds. It was a case of laziness and a belief that he was smarter than the compiler, rather than a lack of knowledge of basic flow control. For context, the "ten-item-only data transfer tool" was a plugin to a much larger piece of software with a Qt-based gui. He copy-pasted an example from the vendor that used a QLineEdit input widget ten times because he couldn't be bothered to look up how to use a QListWidget or something similar. The "avoidance of loops" I was referring to was mostly in the inner loops of volumetric image processing routines. A lot of things we worked on were domain-specific operations that are vaguely analogous to a convolution -- there's usually a moving window operation. He'd happily loop over the volume, but insist on writing the inner loop (the actual moving window) as repeated copy-pasted lines. He was basically doing manual loop unrolling, which could actually make sense in this context. (The codebase was C masquerading as C++.) However, the compiler was perfectly capable of optimizing a loop for the exact use cases he was working with. There was zero benefit manually unrolling a nested loop for a 5x5x11 or 3x3x7 window (in once case he did it for a 25x25x51 window -- 31k lines of C++... Generated with Perl... Yeah...) On the geology note, palentology is actually a fairly niche field. I wouldn't assume that every geologist has taken a paleo class. It's usually on the "take 3 of these 5" requirement list in undergrad, and it's not something you take at a graduate level unless that's your specialty. I certainly took a couple paleo/evolutionary biology classes, but it's useful for what I used to do. It wouldn't shock me if someone primarily doing reservoir modeling didn't know what an ammonite was.