You know more about the subject than I do, but I don't think you're entirely contradicting one of the author's key points: It's incredibly hard to rewrite a system from scratch - and in effect, to just write a system from scratch.
But it would make sense to have a "professional scientific fortran programmer" go in and do some housecleaning to make things right, without whining, "Why can't I just rewrite it in Java???" Heck, it sounds like fun to me, but that's because I'm basically a professional janitor, and hey, hurricanes and polar vortexes and all that.
So why doesn't that happen? Is testing improvements too expensive? Do scientific programmers just have no respect for the craft whatsoever? Is there nobody with the necessary interdisciplinary skill set?
But it would make sense to have a "professional scientific fortran programmer" go in and do some housecleaning to make things right, without whining, "Why can't I just rewrite it in Java???" Heck, it sounds like fun to me, but that's because I'm basically a professional janitor, and hey, hurricanes and polar vortexes and all that.
So why doesn't that happen? Is testing improvements too expensive? Do scientific programmers just have no respect for the craft whatsoever? Is there nobody with the necessary interdisciplinary skill set?