John Graham-Cumming strikes as a straight shooter. He both criticizes and defends parts of their programming. Here are the links to the last three posts that he has put up on his blog.
Whoops. There's a third bug in that code.
We should probably feel sorry for Ian 'Harry' Harris at CRU
Reading through the code and then through his HARRY_READ_ME.TXT you can see a man up against something that was slightly outside his ability. I don't mean that in a nasty way; what was needed was a professional programmer and not a professional scientist.
In the midst of the file we find the following plaintive exclamations:Something is very poorly. It's my programming skills, isn't it.
andSo, once again I don't understand statistics. Quel surprise, given that
I haven't had any training in stats in my entire life, unless you count
A-level maths.
andand.. yup, my awful programming strikes again.
andSo, good news - but only in the sense that I've found the error.
Bad news in that it's a further confirmation that my abilities are
short of what's required here.
Bugs in the software flash the message 'Something's out there'
The more I look at the software used by the folks at CRU, the more I think: "these guys seriously need to hire a professional programmer." The code is mostly an undocumented, untested tangled mess of little programs. Ugh.
Oh, and it's buggy. . . .
The BBC on the computer programming used by the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit
4/
5
Oleh
abudzar