FORTRAN quotes:<p>“You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers." — Steven Feiner.<p>"FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use." — Dijkstra, circa 1970.<p>"FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular." — Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust"<p>"In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included." — Dijkstra (1930—2002).<p>"Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice." — Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual<p>"FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed — it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer." — Alan J. Perlis.<p>"You can create bad Fortran in any language." —?<p>“I don't know what the programming language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called FORTRAN.” — Dijkstra<p>“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” - Picasso<p>From: <a href="http://www.csl.mtu.edu/cs5311.ck/www/quote.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.csl.mtu.edu/cs5311.ck/www/quote.html</a> and <a href="https://www.gdargaud.net/Humor/QuotesProgramming.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gdargaud.net/Humor/QuotesProgramming.html</a>
When I was learning Fortran I thought there were some ugly features about it especially its I/O - format statements etc., but what I thought was irrelevant (even to my lecturers). What people think of it doesn't matter much (most of its critics aren't regular users anyway).<p>It seems to me the only real issues with Fortran are whether the huge legacy of the nearly 70 years of engineering and scientific programs and well-tested subroutines will continue to be used or are declared out of date/useless — and whether the many engineers and scientists who now use supercomputers stop using it and change to something else.<p>I'd put a small wager on that it will likely be around for a while yet (it might even be the first working language to make it to 100).
"as scientists are flocking to newer languages such as Python or Julia."... well, guess what? SciPy is partly written in... Fortran (and C/C++)! By its own nature, Python can't be as fast as Fortran. That's why most Python libraries doing heavy computation are implemented in Fortran and/or C/C++...
FORTRAN is still the performance normal any numerics and linear algebra language is measured against. Up to now, most fail or require very ugly code to get up to FORTRAN levels of performance. Others cheat and just link FORTRAN libraries to do the heavy lifting.