This reminds me of a talk I attended at AGU about the huge legacy of code for climate modeling. The question was whether the projects should be started from scr

This reminds me of a talk I attended at AGU about the huge legacy of code for climate modeling. The question was whether the projects should be started from scratch with better engineering principles. Check out the slides here. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/presentations/Easterbrook-AGU-fall2010.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/presentations/Easterbrook-AGU... The goals of scientific code are often different than code written by software engineers. Having reproducible consistent output for a given input is very important and it's hard to move a bunch of Fortran to Python with confidence that the output maintains a 1:1 precision from historical inputs.