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by RogerL 3930 days ago
It is not "cool". That's the main problem, which is no problem at all.

Now, if Bloomberg's code is a spaghetti monster (I have no idea), that is a problem. But that is a problem of legacy code, not a 'Fortran' problem.

I think it is a bad article based on hearsay by one ex-bloomberger.

1 comments

> Now, if Bloomberg's code is a spaghetti monster (I have no idea), that is a problem. But that is a problem of legacy code, not a 'Fortran' problem.

This I think is the key point: lots of time when I've seen people mistake a practices problem like this (that result in expensive-to-maintain "legacy" code) with implementation language problems, they end up doing a conversion to a new language (often doing the worst thing you can do with a poorly specified, poorly documented, but basically working codebase, a "big-bang" replacement rather than an incremental one) without fixing the process issues, and so end up creating a new poorly-specified, poorly-documented, often less-well-working "instant legacy" codebase that just happens to be in a currently-fashionable language.