Of course knowing a programming language strongly biases someone to choose that language in a project. I also agree you will not find a lot of people (if any) u

Of course knowing a programming language strongly biases someone to choose that language in a project. I also agree you will not find a lot of people (if any) using Fortran who have not been introduced to the language as part of their research, following the recommendation of someone senior (e.g. their advisor). However your original argument was that Fortran was only used because advisors were forcing their students to do so, and that Fortran would die out eventually along with those dinosaurs. I don't think this is true, and I don't think the fact that people generally don't just stumble into Fortran by themselves is any evidence to the contrary. As the original article points out, the reason that Fortran continues to be used is that it is the most suitable language for its domain (but of course not as a general purpose language) The prerequisite for using Fortran is that someone works in a field that relies heavily on large scale, high performance numerical computation. Since Fortran is pervasive in that domain, it's extremely likely the they would be exposed to Fortran through "apprenticeship". Basically, most people who should be using Fortran are using Fortran! I've seen a few instances where people used C/C++ or Matlab in situations where Fortran would have been more appropriate. Matlab has its own drawbacks, but it is also a very domain-specific numerical language, and likewise its users are exposed to it through apprenticeship! C/C++ is still the default language for high performance computing outside of numerics, and thus it's not surprising that people who have not been exposed to Fortran would attempt to use it for numerical purposes as well. There isn't exactly a lot of choice for numerical programming: Python and Matlab are (partly) designed with numerical purposes in mind, but don't scale to high performance. C/C++ are performant, but not expressive for numerics. There really isn't any other language that would even be in consideration, besides now Julia, but Julia is extremely new, so time will tell. I don't know anything about Rust, but based on reading its Wikipedia article its not a language designed for numerics, but basically something designed to replace C++ for systems programming. Thus, like C/C++, it will be performant, but not expressive for numerical purposes.