Simply out (and for those) that don't want to reads the more details arguments - please don't try to compare Fortran to C, Pascal, Java, Rust etc. or many other languages - please do not knock it because you don't need to use it or look down on those that do use because it helps them. But, instead remember that is in your toolbox, has been and is an appropriate solution for many problems, and is likely to continue to be for many years.

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Today's Fortran is not, the language Backus and team at IBM created in the late 1950s. Like English (or 'American English' maybe), it has morphed a bit and taken ideas from other languages.

Also without wanting to start a war about this, I want to agree strongly with it. I work somewhere where our main computational tool is a large Fortran program which does things critical to the security (both economic and defence) of the country I live in. It's officially in Fortran 90 but I think older chunks of it are probably still in FORTRAN 77 and yet other chunks written to more recent standards.

It's a horrible thing, but it's a horrible thing because it has been written by scientists rather than people who have software backgrounds, and written & maintained over something like 30 years or more. In particular it's not horrible because it's in Fortran: Fortran 90 is a reasonably pleasant language as far as I can see (I learnt FORTRAN 77 and since I don't work directly on this program I'm not really familiar enough with the later standards to make a strong statement), and later standards seem even more pleasant.

We're in the early stages of replacing this program by something which will scale bette (to, eventually, millions rather than thousands of cores). That program is going to be written in Fortran (with fairly extensive preprocessing to isolate science code from details of the implementation), and that's *the right decision*.