[fargle]

> the code, not so much

Exactly. And what's nice about that approach is that it sidesteps that ludicrous license.

As many people point out, you shouldn't roll-your-own numeric code. Unless you are solely responsible for knowing it's what you want and are cognizant of all the tricky edge cases and can make informed engineering decisions of course.

As the article says "Numerical Recipes is a good book for learning about numerical methods." I agree. If I need a quick algorithm in my language of choice, I might refer to NR in Fortran or C as a guide, but the actual implementation must be cleaned up and integrated correctly. Probably extended and specialized and combined with whatever tricks are required for the purpose. The books are (were) useful as books, but the code was never more than executable pseudo-code. I find it helpful to understand the algorithm, and once I do, I immediately begin seeing where I need to adjust it too.

And you can't copyright algorithms. So as long as I don't make a NR.py lib (which no-one needs) that contains the entire Structure, sequence and organization (SSO) of the book, the publishers can stick their crappy license where they like. I don't have to boycott the book.