HORTON is a free and open-source electronic-structure package written primarily in Python 3 with some underlying C++ components. While HORTON’s development has been mainly directed by the research interests of its leading contributing groups, it is designed to be easily modified, extended, and used by other developers of quantum chemistry methods or post-processing techniques. Most importantly, HORTON adheres to modern principles of software development, including modularity, readability, flexibility, comprehensive documentation, automatic testing, version control, and quality-assurance protocols. This article explains how the principles and structure of HORTON have evolved since we started developing it more than a decade ago. We review the features and functionality of the latest HORTON release (version 2.3) and discuss how HORTON is evolving to support electronic structure theory research for the next decade.

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HORTON 的故事：科学软件开发十年的经验教训

HORTON 是一个免费的开源电子结构包，主要用 Python 3 编写，并带有一些底层 C++ 组件。虽然 HORTON 的开发主要是由其主要贡献小组的研究兴趣指导的，但它的设计目的是很容易被量子化学方法或后处理技术的其他开发人员修改、扩展和使用。最重要的是，HORTON 遵循现代软件开发原则，包括模块化、可读性、灵活性、全面的文档、自动测试、版本控制和质量保证协议。本文解释了自十多年前我们开始开发 HORTON 以来，HORTON 的原理和结构是如何演变的。我们回顾了最新 HORTON 版本（版本 2.3）的特性和功能，并讨论了 HORTON 如何发展以支持未来十年的电子结构理论研究。