jacobwilliams:
I tend to disagree with the thinking that all the ancient FORTRAN 77 code is good for Fortran in some way. No young person who sees this code wants anything to do with Fortran. It reinforces the perception of Fortran as some kind of ancient legacy machine code for math. I think it is very harmful.
I also think that it is inevitable that all of that FORTRAN 77 code in SciPy is going to be removed. It’s just a matter of time. It’s already happening with fftpack . No one wants to work on it. And for good reason, it’s a scene of horrors. Some of it has bugs from decades ago (recent bugs were found in QUADPACK).
I’m also not a big fan of modern interfaces to old FORTRAN77 code, for the same reasons. Also, when you do that, the namespace of your project is still polluted with all those subroutine names, and you can still call them (with no interface checking) since nothing is requiring you to use the module. So if you forget, you are back in 1977 without realizing it. I have been bitten by this before in the past.
Modernization is the way to go!
I have almost the same opinions. When the legacy packages become not understandable and maintainable (let alone extendable), the legacy may do more harm than good. They must be modernized or else they will be abandoned when nobody wants to work on/look at them anymore.
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