The aspect of amateur astronomy culture that discouraged me was the awful code published in Sky & Telescope back in the late 80s or early 90s.
They used to have a policy that in order to be compatible with the least common denominator of their readers, they required published programs to be in BASIC. And not just BASIC, but basic BASIC, with line numbers.
As far as I was concerned, it was unreadable and obsolete since about 1985. It also probably influenced me away from ever learning Forth by association.
Not to mention, that when I got a book on astronomical computer algorithms, it turned out that the available implementations were in Fortran, which to my taste was as bad or worse.
Not only that, but modern compilers are insanely good at compiling numerical Fortran code. The very first optimizing compiler was for Fortran and it's consistently been on the forefront of compiler techniques ever since.
I know that's the cliche, but I don't think that something like VSOP87 would be noticeably faster compiled with Fortran vs. C, in the early 90s. If there even was a Fortran compiler available for Mac or Amiga, it was probably priced obscenely, too.
They used to have a policy that in order to be compatible with the least common denominator of their readers, they required published programs to be in BASIC. And not just BASIC, but basic BASIC, with line numbers.
As far as I was concerned, it was unreadable and obsolete since about 1985. It also probably influenced me away from ever learning Forth by association.
Not to mention, that when I got a book on astronomical computer algorithms, it turned out that the available implementations were in Fortran, which to my taste was as bad or worse.