Lorin Hochstein 
Junior dev: I’m bummed by how little of the code I write will ever run in production
Senior dev: I’m horrified by how much of the code I’ve written is still running in production
Paul Williams@norootcause My Dad's Fortran code written in the 70s (he retired 25 years ago) was only replaced a few years ago (by my wife and her team!). He was horrified when we told him. "That should have been replaced a GENERATION ago!" - Dad
arclight@buddhawilliams @norootcause I'm curious about this project, mainly the motivations for the rewrite. I do a lot of legacy Fortran recovery and I'm always on the lookout for recovery and replacement stories.
Of the codes I've recovered, there's only been one I would call bad. The modeling was too coarse and there were clear signs of serious truncation and roundoff error; it wasnt clear what the purpose of the code was at the time it was written (late-60s). The underlying engineering wasn't very good so no amount of modernization was going to fix what was really broken. Most of the other codes were some degree of inconvenient, twisted around platform and language limitations that no longer exist. Generally the codes are still useful if limited and their main fault is they've been neglected for 30 years or more.
@arclight @norootcause it wasn’t my job so don’t know a lot about it. But it was a rostering system that had a huge number of rules for assigning rosters within hospitals I believe. Every time they added a new rule (‘don’t put person x on same shift as person y’) etc the processing was taking exponentially longer so it needed to be looked at. The original code was built by external contractors so little institutional knowledge kept so when they decided it needed cleaning up it made sense, to them at least, that they rewrite it rather than fix the code.
At least that is my understanding from a third party.
At least that is my understanding from a third party.
@buddhawilliams @norootcause Yeah, that sounds like a bad application of Fortran. But if it's the 70s, F66 may have been the only decent language available. Sounds like rewriting was the right choice for a lot of reasons.
@arclight @buddhawilliams I have always loved how scientific programmers refer to software as “codes”
@norootcause @buddhawilliams You should hear us keep referring to input files as "decks" :D
@arclight @buddhawilliams At least tell me they aren’t on punch cards anymore!