Fortran is much easier to use than its direct competitors if you are writing array-based number crunching. For all other used, it’s hopelessly outdated. If I we

Fortran is much easier to use than its direct competitors if you are writing array-based number crunching. For all other used, it’s hopelessly outdated. If I were to explain its purpose to a non-fortran programmer, I’d say that Fortran is useful for number crunching kinda like regular expressions are great for certain text processing tasks. It’s basically a domain specific language and should be used accordingly. Wrap in C++ or f2py and call the routines from python/C++, where you do the «software parts»: IO, GUI, ... That being said, I usually just use python and surf on other people’s hard work! Oh, and the author is wrong on many of the specific details. For instance, MPI is available to many languages, including python.