Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say experts

[AtW]

“ The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.”

Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say experts

[Paddy]

10 ' COVID-19 Program!
20 TextWindow.WriteLine("Type number of daily suspected infections")
30 number = TextWindow.Read()
40 TextWindow.WriteLine(" Tommorow there will be " + number*2 + " COVID-19 infections ")

[GigiBronz]

Is this part of the effort to discredit purpose of the lockdown in the firstplace and herd the plebs back to the office?
Same lockdown that was put in place way to late and lead to the highest number of deaths in Europe?

[AtW]

Is this part of the effort to discredit purpose of the lockdown in the firstplace and herd the plebs back to the office??

Yup

[NotAllThere]

Scientific programming is always crap. Write your program, solve your problem, throw the program away.

That's why Fortran was such a boon to scientists when invented.(According to the comments on the current article in The Register about ALGOL 60).

[OwlHoot]

Scientific programming is always crap. Write your program, solve your problem, throw the program away. ..

Not throw it away.

Give it to generations of postdocs to adapt for their requirements, so that it becomes ever more opaque and incoherent, like Chinese whispers.

Oh and ensure the postdocs are up against pressing deadlines, so they have no time to fully understand the program or make improvements.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Ensure by the deft use of EQUIVALENCE and Arithmetic IF along with 15 page DO loops that no one has the slightest idea of WTF it's doing.

Sorted.

If you can include an ASSIGNED GOTO then it's sorted**2.

AndNeverEverUseWhiteSpaceSinceFORTRANignoresIt

[Whorty]

Is this part of the effort to discredit purpose of the lockdown in the firstplace and herd the plebs back to the office?
Same lockdown that was put in place way to late and lead to the highest number of deaths in Europe?

Almost half of our deaths are via care homes. Care homes 'locked down' before the rest of the country. The virus was introduced to care homes by sending back infected patients from hospital, to clear beds.

Had we protected care homes from the start we'd almost certainly have a lot less deaths than currently.

HTH

[Whorty]

Scientific programming is always crap. Write your program, solve your problem, throw the program away.

That's why Fortran was such a boon to scientists when invented.(According to the comments on the current article in The Register about ALGOL 60).

Oooh, FORTRAN ... I used to program in that back in my statistician days (late 80s/early 90s). FORTRAN77 to be precise

I then moved on to DBASE III/IV and Clipper ... those were the good old days

[elsergiovolador]

I thought scientists these days start off with the results and then work their way backwards to find right participants and conditions that will meet ordered outcome.

Scientists today have the same problem as medieval painters used to have - they need to paint the picture that makes the client happy, there is no place for ugly truth.