I believe we should think of Fortran as a domain-specific language for handling multidimensional arrays, rather than a normal programming language. It might be terrible for other things, but it's great for array computations, and that's what people use it for in big simulations. Since it has a well-defined C FFI nowadays, it's easy to connect it to other languages that can do other things (parsing data files, etc.).
Coming from a more traditional CS background, I always thought that Fortran was archaic until I actually had to learn it for some scientific computing. I found it awkward to use, but at the same time, it had array capabilities that I've never seen in any other language.
Coming from a more traditional CS background, I always thought that Fortran was archaic until I actually had to learn it for some scientific computing. I found it awkward to use, but at the same time, it had array capabilities that I've never seen in any other language.