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> Now you need to do a follow on study to see how much science the 'rival' group does with a more modern codebase than your 'legacy' group does. Would you know
by privong 9y ago
> Now you need to do a follow on study to see how much science the 'rival' group does with a more modern codebase than your 'legacy' group does. Would you know if there are enough examples of two groups who have diverged like this to get meaningful (as in statistically significant) results on the cost benefit of porting / not porting?
I don't know of any studies like this. But there are two aspects to consider. One is what you've pointed out, which is the long-term scientific gains and the productivity of the research group as an entity. But the other aspect is whether those students who rewrote the code into C++ were more or less successful than the students who weren't rewriting code.
Obviously, how you judge success in the latter will be tricky, since there may be differences in the interest of students who rewrote the code and their desired outcome after the PhD (e.g., stay in academia versus go into industry).
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThat is a good point, if the majority of the code is living in Fortran then there is definitely some value in understanding large legacy Fortran code bases.
- privong 9y agoThis is true. Though I realized I wasn't specific enough in what I meant. I was more thinking about the limited available time to students and that rewriting code might mean the students do less science and so are less able to obtain a good postdoctoral position (or whatever position typically follows a PhD in the particular field).
- quantum_magpie 9y agoTrue, but the students that re-implement these codebases also might have a much greater understanding of the underlying techniques, theory, and the interaction between them; compared to others who produce more results, but use these codebases as black boxes. I think both pathways lead to equally good academic careers, they just branch out into separate paths.