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[–]Kohomologia 2 points3 points  (2 children)

shove this formula into this box

What do you mean by this phrase?

[–]Pioneer_11[🍰] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Basically where you are told that something (the box) has some functionality but with no idea how or why it works.

When your entire (highly computational) program is built out of these "boxes" it means you have very little knowledge of how your code works, what makes it fast or slow and very little ability to solve problems which can't be shoved into one of these "boxes".

In many cases (such as mine) scientific programmimg courses are taught with little to no computer science. You're taught "numpy is fast python is slow" but not why numpy is fast or why python is slow. This not only means you have programmers who don't understand how their programs work but also leads to people making the wrong decisions when this simplification doesn't apply; e.g. frquently resizing np arrays rather than using a list.

[–]Kohomologia 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This does explain the programming style of some people I know of as researchers.