Turbulence All the Way Down: Ten Weeks Rewriting a 40-Year Fortran Ocean Model in Python
There is a particular kind of hubris that shows up in engineering projects. It is the moment you look at 87 Fortran files representing forty years of accumulated ocean physics and think: I can do this in Python. Not translate the interface. Not wrap the binary. Rewrite it. Subroutine by subroutine, comment by comment, constant by constant, until what you have is a Python package that produces the same numbers — to a scientifically meaningful degree of precision — as a compiled Fortran model that has been validated against field observations across four decades. ...