> Now, if Bloomberg's code is a spaghetti monster (I have no idea), that is a problem. But that is a problem of legacy code, not a 'Fortran' problem.
This I think is the key point: lots of time when I've seen people mistake a practices problem like this (that result in expensive-to-maintain "legacy" code) with implementation language problems, they end up doing a conversion to a new language (often doing the worst thing you can do with a poorly specified, poorly documented, but basically working codebase, a "big-bang" replacement rather than an incremental one) without fixing the process issues, and so end up creating a new poorly-specified, poorly-documented, often less-well-working "instant legacy" codebase that just happens to be in a currently-fashionable language.
This I think is the key point: lots of time when I've seen people mistake a practices problem like this (that result in expensive-to-maintain "legacy" code) with implementation language problems, they end up doing a conversion to a new language (often doing the worst thing you can do with a poorly specified, poorly documented, but basically working codebase, a "big-bang" replacement rather than an incremental one) without fixing the process issues, and so end up creating a new poorly-specified, poorly-documented, often less-well-working "instant legacy" codebase that just happens to be in a currently-fashionable language.