ferguson lost the handle on his overall design, or his algorithm sucked to begin with, or he never understood the problem, or maybe he's just a crappy programmer.
but that the dumbest damn thing I've read in quite some time.
OK I agree, the language itself isn’t the problem. It’s just odd to see FORTRAN being used these days. I am pretty sure a model could be developed using Microsoft Excel functions that would be just as good. Or any other language or software.
I also tend to agree, the integrity of the modeler is paramount. If you tweak it constantly because the results don’t fit your thesis then that is not scientific. And in the end, when they started this modeling, they really didn’t know all that much about disease spread, susceptibility... hell we didn’t even have many tests. There was no way a model could predict things it didn’t and couldn’t factor.