Comment by ggm
4 days ago
Used to man the free help desk for programming problems at the uni computing centre I worked at. "Have you got a current listing of the program" got rid of most of them.
Saddest case was a PhD student in chemical engineering near the end of his thesis work struggling to get reproducible results. After half an hour of debug I realised he was using un-initialised Fortran array state for his data. I suspect his discovery went up in smoke.
I remember helping a research group port some old Fortran code they had to a more modern environment and compiler. Turning on array bounds checking made the program crash pretty quickly. "There can't be a problem with the code as we've published papers with it". Umm, sorry sunshine, that's not how it works.
many such cases