As part of my PhD, I developed a Maple package for deriving FEM element matrices from first principles. My supervisor, despite years of work related to FEM and

As part of my PhD, I developed a Maple package for deriving FEM element matrices from first principles. My supervisor, despite years of work related to FEM and having done a lot of Maple programming didn't understand a lot of my code as I used some Maple techniques he had never seen. Even after co-authoring a conference paper on it he still doesn't understand the details. Sometimes, it can be the tools we use that end up forcing one into poor practices. Maple supports doing multiple substitutions if you pass it a list, but I found that if you had enough, it would just ignore part of the list. So, I had to code a workaround that looped through the substitutions one at a time. My supervisor was very meticulous about verifying results. So, I verified my code against various known analytical solutions and showed good convergence. So often I saw the same thing as you that the code is written for a single project and never run again (I've written code like that), so the attitude becomes why spend too much time on it? Of course, Maple, Matlab, and Mathematica's interactive environments don't help matters as you're often working through the problem and then turning that session into a function or a script.