[Angostura]

The analogy is not apt. A closer analogy is not a programmer - the doctor is in IT support ... and is dealing with a unique combination of bespoke hardware and software for each case ... and has no makers documentation available.

[clavalle]

I wouldn't say bespoke (which implies written from the ground up from scratch), but with possibly different environment and other configuration variables and, occasionally, slightly different shared library files.

And while there is no official documentation available, there is plenty of good guesses from hordes of brilliant reverse engineers.

Still, there are only a handful of error codes that are thrown, and you have to make your first guesses from those and the logging is pretty terrible when you do decide to dig a bit deeper.

And inserting your own code into the spaghetti mess is a bit of a crapshoot.