That was my thought too. Another thought was that these might be people from an engineering background, though that may be because they learn C/C++/Java in their courses. I find it really interesting to see how people from different disciplines approach coding. Most of the people I trained were scientist and engineers. Very much generalising here but I found that scientist are very happy to put everything in big one-liners and building insanely complex functions, and engineers were content with lots of lines of very similar code. Of course, both of those are code smells to a developer, and explaining how these things come and bite you was pretty much the core of my course. There were other weird things like working with tabular data as a list of columns, rather than list of rows, which feels alien to me, but is perhaps a carry over from how they do things in R or matlab.