The Natural Philosopher coughed up some electrons that declared:

The phsicists and scientists thought about it first THEN rippoed off te
code, took a bit longer and produced a better result.

Spooky - that's what I do...

Te mathematicians thought about it a lot, reduced it to some sort of
equation, and eventually dio teh best job of all.

LoL!

The computers scientists spent ALL the time deciding which of two
hopelessly impractical approaches was 'the most elegant' or worst of
all, tried to code as if it was an exercise in pseudo coed and object
oriented design, and got themselves into such a mess that they had to be
taken off the project altogether.

Or want to write it in some language no-one else in the group understands.

And then refuse to write it in perl because "python is superior in every
way". When told they must write it in perl, they complied with much
grumbling and some further lectures on the inelegance of perl. Then x-weeks
later when I looked at the code, about 50 lines down was a call to a
slightly hidden python script to do the interesting bits!

When I started at Imperial, we have system maintenance scripts (many
scripts, all siblings in a family of scripts that did interesting useful
tghings on a periodic basis) written in perl, python, bash, csh and I think
there was even one in haskell.

When I finished, we had everthing in perl with a common library set that
handled all the useful common stuff like DB access, opening a new file to
write and ensuring the atomic replacement of the old file (it's bad to have
the PC powered off just between truncating the password file and writing
out the new version and fsyncing it - it happened surprisingly often too)
and lots of stuff like that. Many scripts were both hugely bombproof in a
uniform way but only 20 lines long to do a 20 line job - the way it should
be...

Best of all were software engineers. People with a practical bent who
knew JUST enough about the WHOLE of a computer system to work out where
performance mattered, and were thick enough themselves to write clean
simple code that got the job done if not that elegantly, at least
understandably, and where to ask in the mathematicians to do the one
tricky algorithm they couldn't get their brains round.

Ahh. Proper engineers...