It’s weird that “legacy code” is a pejorative.

If your code has lasted long enough to be considered “old”, but is still so useful that it can’t just be deleted without a dedicated replacement effort… it’s doing something right.

Fortran. At least it was comprehensible to a human brain once upon a time. And probably efficiently written.

Code that has lasted, with some maintenance, for 50+ years vs code that doesn’t work from day 1? What advances we have made!

the fortran code was probably written by someone who knew what they were doing and didn’t need 1 gb of libraries to implement the save button.

and the fact that the code survived till today does say something about its quality. i don’t think this is hard choice.

Fortran, all day every day. Because every byte of the 1969 code is there for a reason.