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The actual title is, "Why are Climate models written in programming languages from 1950?". I think the assumption that "old is bad" is the cause of many, many,

The actual title is, "Why are Climate models written in programming languages from 1950?". I think the assumption that "old is bad" is the cause of many, many, many foolish decisions. Useless code rewrites, company reorganizations that are not significant improvements, and many other bad ideas hinge on this Worship Of The New. Why are we using an alphabetic system originally developed c. 1800BC? It's old, we should switch to new writing systems every 10 years because they're new, right :-)? Older is not better. Newer is not better. Better is better. There's no point in switching something if the destination isn't better, and even if it's clearly better, it needs to be so much better that it's worth the switching cost.

madhadron 6y ago
And it's just a misunderstanding. I think it was Perlis who said, "We don't know what the programming language of the future will look like, but we know it will be called FORTRAN."
- gnufx 6y ago
  Hoare said "I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran". He also said "ALGOL 60 is alive and well and living in Fortran 90", which is a decent compliment from him.
  - madhadron 6y ago
    Ah, thank you.
anthk 6y ago
This. The OS I use dates back to BSD 4.4, which is a rewrite and rehasing on some OS which is about 50 years old. The audio plug is over 100 years old, and modern TTY's date back to what, 80 years? If it works, it works. Also, damn Calculus is over 200 years old. Or maybe 2000, depending if you compare it to the method of exhaustion or not.