I stumbled upon this article (Myths and Legends in High-Performance Computing) about the high performance computing which discuss myths and legends of high performance computing:
And the myth #10: Fortran Is Dead, Long Live the DSL!
How often have we heard “Fortran is dead, long live X”?
Slogans like this have been resonating in the community for
nearly 40 years (Post 1982). X has been everything from
C to C++, and more recently Python or Domain-Specific
Languages (DSLs). Yet, Fortran remains in wide use in
important communities such as weather and climate even
for newly written codes. Other languages, such as COBOL
were indeed replaced with more modern alternatives such
as Java. Why is this? Are some parts of our community just
stubborn to follow the youngsters? Or are old languages not
necessarily bad for the task?
Indeed, Fortran is a very well
designed language for its purpose of expressing mathematical
programs at highest performance. It seems hard to replace it
with C or other languages and outperform it or even achieve
the same baseline. This may be due to the highly optimized
ortran compilers or the limited language features (e.g., no
pointer aliasing) that enable more powerful optimizations.