1. A program from 30 years ago will compile and run. 2. As a research student your first program is likely to be a F77 program written by your professor or an

1. A program from 30 years ago will compile and run. 2. As a research student your first program is likely to be a F77 program written by your professor or an older colleague. 3. A library from 30 years ago can be easily wrapped into a modern program, compiled and run. 4. Arrays are really the most important thing for this sort of programming and since F90 array level operations have been baked into the language. 5. It is fairly trivial to write fast Fortran. 6. Fortran is much easier to use for numerical stuff than c++