Computer science comes up with new languages like a flavor of the month. Fortran is the common language of scientific programming.
Computation intensive scientific problems such as electronic structure are as old as Douglas Hartree (i.e. predates computers). These
problems can take (and have taken) multiple lifetimes --- a 5 year phd in computational physical science is just getting a warm up.
For example, the Gaussian package was started by Nobel laureate John Pople in 1970 and has been continuously developed by research
groups around the world ever since --- and its still in Fortran, even though it is a commercial package. That's not a legacy code -- thats a
living code that has left (and still leaves!) a legacy!
Slashdot Mirror
A: Legacy code.
Computer science comes up with new languages like a flavor of the month. Fortran is the common language of scientific programming. Computation intensive scientific problems such as electronic structure are as old as Douglas Hartree (i.e. predates computers). These problems can take (and have taken) multiple lifetimes --- a 5 year phd in computational physical science is just getting a warm up. For example, the Gaussian package was started by Nobel laureate John Pople in 1970 and has been continuously developed by research groups around the world ever since --- and its still in Fortran, even though it is a commercial package. That's not a legacy code -- thats a living code that has left (and still leaves!) a legacy!