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NPC-131072 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Wonder why you're in lockdown? Wonder no more, the code review is in: [lockdownsceptics.org]

Imperial finally released a derivative of Ferguson’s code. I figured I’d do a review of it and send you some of the things I noticed. I don’t know your background so apologies if some of this is pitched at the wrong level.

It isn’t the code Ferguson ran to produce his famous Report 9. What’s been released on GitHub [github.com] is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others. This revised codebase is split into multiple files for legibility and written in C++, whereas the original program was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade [twitter.com]” (this is considered extremely poor practice). A request for the original code was made 8 days ago but ignored [github.com], and it will probably take some kind of legal compulsion to make them release it. Clearly, Imperial are too embarrassed by the state of it ever to release it of their own free will, which is unacceptable given that it was paid for by the taxpayer and belongs to them.

I predict this story will be better commented than the original code.

Original Submission