It's pretty widely used in "traditional" engineering, at least in mechanical/civil/nuclear/aerospace. My impression is that it's probably a holdover from the go

It's pretty widely used in "traditional" engineering, at least in mechanical/civil/nuclear/aerospace. My impression is that it's probably a holdover from the good old days FORTRAN-IV. See for example Code_Aster (as in, "a code"), which is one of the largest projects for open source FEA (and it mostly rooted in academia).