It’s easy to forget just how shambolic lots of scientific software is. Companies like Google and Microsoft pour billions into favoured mainstream topics, sometimes producing vaguely coherent and well maintained libraries — though even those can be unstable, prone to being broken at the most inopportune moment. But step even slightly off the beaten path and you’re plunged into a steampunk wilderness of mismatched decaying Heath Robinson contraptions lashed together with fish guts and twine. And you have to catch and gut your own fish.
I mostly understand the reasons for this, but it’s still incredibly frustrating. It’s a miracle anything ever gets done, and a lot of the time it just doesn’t.