I also work with a lot of legacy code most of it is Fortran. I really don't mind using Fortran- all the modern compilers allow variable names greater than the old and silly 6 character limit. Also with Fortran 95, you can even do OOP if you feel that your modifications to the existing code base would benefit. C++ has the great disadvantage of memory considerations. I have been programming C/C++ for 20+ years now and I still forget to delete objects and properly fill in destructor.