[Balgair]

I'll give an example: A friend is a PhD candidate in a neuro lab. He uses Matlab almost exclusively and the undergrad was in neuro as well. He has never taken Clac, let alone any matrix algebra. Ask him what det() means, and it's a deer in headlights. That said, he's written about 10k lines of matlab code, with 15 levels deep of nested for() and while() loops. To say he needs help is known, as he paid me to help him out for 16 hours the other month. Literally, it was impossible. I could barely wrap my head about his problem, let alone the code. Remember the saying : 'Don't do data science in a GUI' ? Well, his issues were a good argument for that. Trying to get what he was doing in a python IDE would not be possible, it's just too complicated.

[w_t_payne]

I once worked for a company where the accountants had written a massive and convoluted VBA application that had gradually become mission critical to the company.

The IT department allocated a number of people (half a dozen?) for some time (8-12 months?) trying to turn it into a maintainable software product.

They failed.