People are doing this too. It looks dumb, but inside there're lots of interesting technical challenges.
Some of the awe inspiring breakthroughs are often extremely boring technically. I started my career in the computational chemistry and was looking over the shoulder of the guys doing some really bleeding etch research on organic compounds simulation. Oh, man, do you know how boring it is for a programmer? You're looking at the handwritten prototype of the research paper, filled with quantum physics formulae and encode all this greek language into FORTRAN-IV. Then you run it for a week and either go collecting Nobel prize or finding bugs in your "program".
Some of the awe inspiring breakthroughs are often extremely boring technically. I started my career in the computational chemistry and was looking over the shoulder of the guys doing some really bleeding etch research on organic compounds simulation. Oh, man, do you know how boring it is for a programmer? You're looking at the handwritten prototype of the research paper, filled with quantum physics formulae and encode all this greek language into FORTRAN-IV. Then you run it for a week and either go collecting Nobel prize or finding bugs in your "program".