Anytime humans are involved mistakes will be made. Where I work when something goes down it's a total panic and later it always has to be someone's fault. Sure lends itself to lots of CYA and working scared.
Maybe someone can help me understand a bit better. The author talks about how slow a recursive algorithm is, but the "fast doubling" implementation itself uses recursion. Would not the same slower effect be felt by this implementation due to its use of recursion?