I agree the order of magnitude improvement is no more. Programming in C is much the same as Java. Both are high level curly brace languages. But there is room f

I agree the order of magnitude improvement is no more. Programming in C is much the same as Java. Both are high level curly brace languages. But there is room for improvement still, quite a bit. The fact that Kotlin, Go, etc. were created and became popular supports the fact that large numbers of folks believed that Java's design direction has run it's course to some degree. I may be proven wrong, Valhalla and Loom could be smashing successes and everyone will flock back to Java. But more likely it will take a decade to reap the benefits of the features Valhalla and Loom would provide, benefits already being reaped by other ecosystems right now. State of the art GCs are incredible - but there is a reason you see Java pioneering the GC area, that being that Java has the most to gain because of its tendency to create enormous amounts of garbage, which is a problem other language designs do not suffer from nearly as much, letting them get away with simpler GC while maintaining high performance. And Fortran isn't the only game in town for high performance numerical libraries ;) There is large incentive to reinvent there, as legacy doesn't matter if the new thing has more performance - Eigen, cuBLAS/CUDA, and others are in C++, not Fortran as far as I'm aware. Fortran has momentum no doubt, but it has been on its way out for a long time.