Once upon a time I worked with a guy who knew something about programming. One college class, the rest self-taught. Smart as hell, but absolutely convinced he was not only 'A programmer', no, he was "A Programmer".
Wound up being given the job of writing a bunch of stuff for the agency, because A: he was 'free'(didn't have to pay him anything extra) and B: they figured it was stuff he couldn't mess up(yes, some of you are screaming "NO!!" right now).
You can figure out what happened. Not only did he sometimes put stuff into the system and turn it loose without proper testing("If there's any problem call me, but it'll be fine" as he headed for the door), but he was convinced he knew better than anyone else what was needed and how it should be done. Caused some problems that were still going on when I retired, though things had been much reduced by then.*
That was with one guy writing the stuff; take something like that and add HUGE amounts of complexity AND another guy taking over and trying to figure out the mess left by the first guy and you have this. One of the differences is that in our case, when the guy messed something up or ran something other than the way he was supposed to, he'd generally get called on it and made to fix it; at the CRU they'd just screw with it some more to get the result they wanted. Which idiocy and dishonesty stands likely to cost us not just incredible amounts of money but large chunks of our lives and freedoms if the clowns still pushing this AGW garbage aren't slapped down. Hard. Preferably with a friggin' hockey stick.
Clearly, nothing like these established procedures was used at CRU. Indeed, the code seems to have been written overwhelmingly by just two people (one at a time) over the past 30 years. Neither of these individuals was a formally trained programmer and there appears to have been no project planning or even formal documentation. Indeed, the comments of the second programmer, the hapless “Harry”, as he struggled to understand the work of his predecessor are now being read as a kind of programmer’s Icelandic saga describing a death march through an inexplicable maze of ineptitude and boobytraps.
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