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> A lot of people still program in Fortran 77

That's because you can compile Fortran 77 with a modern Fortran compiler and link the old code into your new one without a lot of work.

On the other hand I fail to see how you could use the Pyhton 3 interpreter with some old incompatible Pyhton library.

1 comments

While true, it shift the question to, why should a F77 programmer use a new Fortran compiler?

Some answers are: it's faster, it runs on new OSes, it has better error messages.

Those then become the same answers to the OP's question about shifting from Python 2.x to 3.x.

Personally I quite like Pyhton 3, but the original comparison was flawed simply because with Fortran 77 you can just take your 30-40 years code recompile it with a new compiler and in 99% of cases will work.

While with Pyhton 2 to Python 3 there is usually a non trivial amount of work you need to put into migrating an old codebase.

I agree. I have a flawed comparison.