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A comment on Why physicists still use Fortran (2015). Parent comment

Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by rxhernandez on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:36PM (#15478100)
20,000 lines of code really doesn't seem like that much. I probably output that much in about 2-3 months of biomedical research so there has to be more to it than that.
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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by jlg23 on Sunday October 15, 2017 @02:03PM (#15478242)
>> legacy code that has been gradually added to since the 1980s

> 20,000 lines of code really doesn't seem like that much.

It's not "20k lines of code" but "n lines of code that grew organically over decades to 20k lines" - with the help of probably way more than 100 people who all are not trained as developers. I think it's a safe bet to say the current state only has a faint memory of being a consistent code base.

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by geezerjay on Sunday October 15, 2017 @06:58PM (#15479821)
> 20,000 lines of code really doesn't seem like that much.

Once I spent close to a month hunting down a subtle but nasty bug in a number crunching module which was perhaps around 2k LoC. Writing code is very easy. Verifying and validating number crunching code is very hard and very time consuming.

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by coldtea on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:43PM (#15478132)
20,000 lines of code casually churned out in 2-3 months will be a nightmare to a) understand, b) maintain, much less to rewrite...
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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by cocoablazing on Sunday October 15, 2017 @03:26PM (#15478794)
It sounds like he’s talking about scripts generated for research, rather than code for components intended to be persistent.
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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by rxhernandez on Sunday October 15, 2017 @05:33PM (#15479421)
Precisely this.
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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by CalChris on Sunday October 15, 2017 @08:41PM (#15480149)
20,000 lines of your code is one thing. 20,000 lines of someone else's code is another thing entirely. 20,000 lines of many other people's code can be insane.
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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by shitgoose on Sunday October 15, 2017 @07:31PM (#15479949)
20k of fortran code is a lot. there are no beans/interfaces/adapters/mediators/listeners - just the code that does business.
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