1) What makes a language like Fortran so intimidating? I wonder the same thing: there is irrational contempt towards Fortran here on Hacker News. I think it sa

1) What makes a language like Fortran so intimidating? I wonder the same thing: there is irrational contempt towards Fortran here on Hacker News. I think it says more about the attitude than it does about Fortran. 2) What makes Fortran so much 'faster' at computation than C? two things: the compilers are excellent, and produce really fast machine code, and intel has invested tremendous amount of engineering, with focus on exploiting the newest features of their processors (such as AVX2). The new ifort compiler comes out every six months. Others like PGI have produced a Fortran compiler which can generate NVidia GPU code. Fortran compiler technology and Fortran the language standard / features are on the cutting edge of the domain Fortran is designed to handle, computing. And since Fortran can actually handle strings and has regex support, I've often wondered what it would be like for web applications...