You guys are absolutely right of course, but I hope you'll forgive this old fart his occasional sip of bitter whine.

When I was as an astronomy undergraduate I got a job as a Fortran programmer for Dr X, my department head. Dr X was a true renaissance man, spoke several languages, was world-renown in his field (astrometry, the determination of super-precise star postions from photographic plates) and a world class mathematician and numerical analyst. He had spent his life developing and justifying approximating algorithms for expediting the massive calculations needed to reduce place constants and higher level transformations to generate and correct positions on the celestial sphere from measurements on photographs.

Not only had he developed the short-cuts that made these calculations for thousands of stars possible, but he had been able to design them to take advantage of uncertainties and imprecisions in the data, so that too much effort was not wasted calculating past the inherent precision of the observations. He also developed statistical tests to ferret out systematic errors in the data, and separate them from random errors. He was old enough that in his youth he developed procedures for human computers (warehouses full of people with 10-key adding machines doing all the math, usually following step by step written instructions without any knowledge of what they actually were doing) which solved the matrices and spherical trig necessary to do this kind of work.

In 1967 he had to rely on a 20 year old kid to write the computer programs that bypassed his entire life's work and ground out these calculations with brute force and at the speed of light. It was a skill I had picked up in a year, but it eluded him. Without computer assistance, he could no longer do his job, and he had to undergo the further humiliation of knowing that I had only a vague idea of what the equations I was coding up did, and no clue as to how they were derived.

Dr X died a few years ago. They named an asteroid after him.