Re: "The code's in Fortran – Modern Fortran, to be exact."
I'd guess its more likely that someone with a lot of experience might just be able to spot where in the program accurate speedups can be obtained - modern fortran isn't slower its just easier to do more generic things so people do that rather than partition things properly. A lot of 3d problems can be mostly solved in 8 bit but only a few bits need to be calculated in 64bit and working out which is which can give you an order of magnitude speedup but leave people gibbering at the code cos that's not how it was done in college.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
