> There is a point about making it as easy and idiomatic to write performant code. There is certainly truth in that and certainly Fortran has an advantage here

> There is a point about making it as easy and idiomatic to write performant code. There is certainly truth in that and certainly Fortran has an advantage here vs. C++ due to the aliasing rules and generally lack of subtle performance footguns in the usage of the language. But TBH, I think a lot of the reasons why Fortran is perceived to be fast is that out of the box it doesn't come with anything like a data structures and algorithms library, and domain experts who don't have a strong CS background are either not aware of other data structures or can't be bothered to implement them, so they code like the array is the only data structure known to man. And CPU's love it.