I'm also confused about this. I don't understand what is wrong with Fortran. In school we learned Fortran 2003 for numeric simulations etc. For my master thesis I programmed in C and there were a lot of things in C that I missed from Fortran. 1) Fortran is easy to learn, no need to know pointers etc 2) very math friendly, easy to extract subarrays/submatrices etc, no need to pass around array lengths etc. matrix's are really easy to deal with. I remember in C we ended up rewriting all two dimensional arrays (matrices) to column major arrays cause it was a pain to deal with (or maybe we were noobs) 3) useful built in functions such as matrix multiplications, in C you end up writing a lot of functions to do what seem like very simple things 4) Great math libraries such as BLAS/LAPACK 5) Seems to me like it less error prone than C (spend a lot less time debugging)

This is just my experience with it. Somewhat to my surprise I really ended up liking Fortran, and the new code doesn't look at all like the old code. For what we did it was also slightly faster than C. If I were to write a numeric program I wouldn't think twice about what language to use. I feel like Fortran is an undervalued language for calculations. But then again, I am by no means an expert.