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by michaelt 1132 days ago
> It's just zealotry of them going "eeew fortran that's like really really old".

The developers of SciPy are maintaining a codebase that is 18% fortran, according to [1]. The only language that makes up a larger part of the codebase is python.

Don't you think it's possible their opinion on fortran is actually informed by quite a bit of experience?

[1] https://github.com/scipy/scipy/

2 comments

I guess one of the major issues is the compilation and packaging of the Fortran code. It is also my experience when developing PDFO ( https://www.pdfo.net/ ), the predecessor of PRIMA.

This is also reflected by the following comment at https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18118#issuecomment-155...

> The real maintenance burden is the compilation and the packaging not the code itself that we are carrying around.

I don't believe anybody would argue against their reluctance for old FORTRAN 77 code; it's a PITA to deal with.

The central issue is that their experience with the old Fortran doesn't translate to modern Fortran; they are two different beasts.

> The central issue is that their experience with the old Fortran doesn't translate to modern Fortran; they are two different beasts.

This is so true! I hope anyone could spend a few minutes checking what modern Fortran is before blaming it. A good reference is https://fortran-lang.org/en/

Buy a copy of plusfort.