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but with Fortran, the reason is generally because there's a large highly optimised legacy codebase that few understand or want to understand. Also it's still di
by CHY872 11y ago
but with Fortran, the reason is generally because there's a large highly optimised legacy codebase that few understand or want to understand. Also it's still difficult to beat Fortran in terms of performance.
Python has neither characteristic. Switching to Python 3 is really easy, and it's easy to understand both. There are only a few projects where it would take more than a week or two to move from Python 2 to non-idiomatic Python 3 (assuming that Python 2 needn't be supported afterwards). Sure for some unviersities or whatever it wouldn't be in the budget, but where active development occurs by this point it's largely due to stubbornness (or need to support python 2 due to stubbornness of others).
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoI worked for a physicist for a number of years who refused to give up on Fortran. It wasn't for (computer) performance reasons. It was because he could quickly get his ideas into code with Fortran. He wasn't interested in computing for the sake of computing.
- coliveira 11y agoMost scientists use computers as a tool to prove that something works. Since few scientists are required to make commercial tools based on these ideas, so there is no reason to use latest software engineering fads/techniques. I know a guy who writes his software in VBA+Excel, and for him it is all that he needs to get data for his scientific papers.