On Sunday, 2 June 2013 at 14:34:43 UTC, Manu wrote:

On 2 June 2013 21:46, Joseph Rushton Wakeling

Well this is another classic point actually. I've been asked by my friends
at Cambridge to give their code a once-over for them on many occasions, and
while I may not understand exactly what their code does, I can often spot
boat-loads of simple functional errors. Like basic programming bugs;
out-by-ones, pointer logic fails, clear lack of understanding of floating
point, or logical structure that will clearly lead to incorrect/unexpected
edge cases.
And it blows my mind that they then run this code on their big sets of
data, write some big analysis/conclusions, and present this statistical
data in some journal somewhere, and are generally accepted as an authority
and taken seriously!

You're making this up. I'm sure they do a lot of data-driven
tests or simulations that make most errors detectable. They may
not be savvy programmers, and their programs may not be
error-free, but boat-loads of errors? C'mon.