My dad got me into computers, but he's not a programmer by trade. He's a mechanical engineer, and he used BASIC on a TRS-80 to do engine simulations to characte

My dad got me into computers, but he's not a programmer by trade. He's a mechanical engineer, and he used BASIC on a TRS-80 to do engine simulations to characterize the mechanical forces on the crankshaft for different crank types. Back then, BASIC was basically what MATLAB is today for engineers. They just slammed some code in there to do the math they needed to do and ran it. They didn't care about things we care about: testability, maintainability, observability. Similarly, Judge Alsup of Oracle v. Google fame writes astronomy software in QBasic. He doesn't give a shit about best practices, if it helps him aim his telescope correctly it's all good. Welcome to a world with citizen programmers. A world of terrible code that does the job. I frickin' love it.