SOME programmers call it “spaghetti code”. Though error-strewn, it works—most of the time. It is likely to have been written in an out-of-date language, possibly more than one of them. It has grown by accretion, as different graduate students and postdocs, many long since departed to other institutions, have tweaked it, fixed it and patched it. And it is, of course, unannotated, so nobody really knows what is going on inside it.
In the rarefied atmosphere of academia, where enthusiasm is all and budgets are tight, that is generally good enough. For commercial applications, though, it is intolerable. Yet academic spaghetti code frequently contains commercially useful ideas that might be sold to outside companies or employed as the basis of new, startup businesses. So there is a market niche available to be occupied by those willing to take the stuff and untangle it.
One occupant of said niche is Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC), a firm based in the eponymous English city. A recent project it carried out was the transformation of drug-testing software developed by researchers at Oxford University into a commercial package called Virtual...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1XN8qXA
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