"Professors usually have this legacy code on hand (often code they wrote themselves decades ago) and pass this code on to their students. This saves their students time, and also takes uncertainty out of the debugging process."
This is so true. I'm a PhD student in physics using Fortran for pretty much that reason. At the start of my PhD, in response to my supervisor telling me I should learn Fortran to modify our current codebase, I asked if I could rewrite what I'd be working on into C++ first, since I was already familiar with it and wanted to bring future development into a more "modern" language.
His response was "You could do that and it would probably be enough to earn your PhD, since it'll take you at least three years. But I suspect you'll want to work on something else during that time".
He was right. I later learnt one of our "rival groups" attempted the same thing and it took three phd students working full time for a year to rewrite their code from fortran to C++.
This is so true. I'm a PhD student in physics using Fortran for pretty much that reason. At the start of my PhD, in response to my supervisor telling me I should learn Fortran to modify our current codebase, I asked if I could rewrite what I'd be working on into C++ first, since I was already familiar with it and wanted to bring future development into a more "modern" language.
His response was "You could do that and it would probably be enough to earn your PhD, since it'll take you at least three years. But I suspect you'll want to work on something else during that time".
He was right. I later learnt one of our "rival groups" attempted the same thing and it took three phd students working full time for a year to rewrite their code from fortran to C++.