Comment Re:School code (Score 4, Insightful) 292
I'm sure I've missed other ways academic code is bad.
The biggest difference is that academic code is _short_. If your whole code base is 10k lines, it's easy to cover all the requirements in a clean design. If you are dealing with millions of lines, there's all kinds of oddball unforeseen interactions and requirements that pop up way late in the game.