To add to some of the answers, Fortran's strength is that a scientist can write an algorithm for some numerical routine fairly easily and the output code will b

To add to some of the answers, Fortran's strength is that a scientist can write an algorithm for some numerical routine fairly easily and the output code will be highly optimized. This is possible because you don't have to deal with all the weird edge cases you have in C/C++ like aliasing. The language is fairly simple so it can be optimized to death and it's easy to add things like automatic vectorization, etc.