[Xcelerate]

Thank goodness someone said it. I get tired of using ancient software that's older than me for relatively simply tasks that should have long ago been coded into a higher level of abstraction. I programmed a pair-correlation function calculation routine using MPI once -- yech.

Fortran, MPI, even C to an extent -- can we please move on? I don't understand why the scientific community is so reluctant to embrace change. It seriously doesn't take that long to learn a new language or a platform like Github (yeah, that's still considered "new" in the scientific community), and the time investment more than pays itself back many times over.

[pron]

> I don't understand why the scientific community is so reluctant to embrace change.

Let's assume the opposite were true, and it was fast to embrace change. How much time would be spent on this change -- relearning, rewriting, refighting old bugs -- vs. actual work done?

Change is overhead. You do as little of it as necessary, and only when not changing starts costing a lot. Which means you change, but slowly.

As to Fortran, it will go away when something better comes along, and then it will do so slowly, for the aforementioned reasons.