[kunstmord]

I've waded through a lot of legacy and current scientific code (and still do that sometimes).

The worst part (not taking into account the coding style per se) for me was the (sometimes) inability to reuse the code I've encountered or adapt it to other cases.

I think scientific advisors should make a point which goes something like "If you're serious about your work, you might find one day that someone else wants to use parts of your code, so take that into account when planning your program". In my experience, a lot of programs are written as quick-hack solutions, and then there is no time to rewrite them, they grow bigger and it just snowballs from there.

The way CS was taught to us (and we're a big university) was pretty bad. No coding style, no experience with CVS, nothing concerning planning before writing new code. In the end, a lot of people got the bare minimum amount of knowledge needed to code, and started doing research using that knowledge.