This brings back memories (of ten years ago). I worked in astrophysics for a while, and maintained a large codebase that included a ton of Fortran, and had a l

This brings back memories (of ten years ago). I worked in astrophysics for a while, and maintained a large codebase that included a ton of Fortran, and had a lot of references to Vax VMS systems within the comments as that's what the team I worked with used mostly through the 80s and early 90s before moving to Linux. One of the things that didn't seem to happen was C - there was some code here and there (I wrote a module for IDL - IDL is a proprietary scripting language that mimics and interoperates with Fortran in a lot of ways). Fortran was able to stick around because of a lot of work on great compilers, and I think, in general, the great speed up of commercial hardware has made the need for hyper optimization less necessary for a lot of day-to-day physics study.