But, knowing where to look for, being able to suss out details from papers, having the almost adequate level of conversation to try and contact authors (if still alive...). The ability to put undecypherable formulas into code and to bear stackoverflow's requirements for a 'good' question. Not a set of skills that amounts to nothing. It's rare nowadays that I see any copy of a reference textbook on numerical recipes, although we do tons of signal processing and HPC stuff.
Recently I rediscovered the ability to compute logs with 64 bits integers with a better precision than double-precision. Man, jumping back into those depths after so many years... Not as easy as reading other people's code.
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But, knowing where to look for, being able to suss out details from papers, having the almost adequate level of conversation to try and contact authors (if still alive...). The ability to put undecypherable formulas into code and to bear stackoverflow's requirements for a 'good' question. Not a set of skills that amounts to nothing. It's rare nowadays that I see any copy of a reference textbook on numerical recipes, although we do tons of signal processing and HPC stuff.
Recently I rediscovered the ability to compute logs with 64 bits integers with a better precision than double-precision. Man, jumping back into those depths after so many years... Not as easy as reading other people's code.