I'd love to see some modern tools to make developing models easier. Most of our models are built on top of already existing models so we have this huge corpus

I'd love to see some modern tools to make developing models easier. Most of our models are built on top of already existing models so we have this huge corpus of C and Fortran spanning from mid 80's. I'm partially guilty for this myself my first instinct when it comes to a new project is to reach for C and "pinch" huge chunks of algorithms from existing code (and most of those algorithms probably came from GSL or NR or similar originally). I can knock up a prototype very quickly since I don't have to rewrite heaps of "boiler plate" algorithms but then I have to deal with the pain of fine tuning the C code. Re-factoring C or Fortan is not great. I'd love to be able to use a higher level language. I'm kind of aware of languages like Python, R and Julia but don't have the time at the moment to learn them.