This is pretty much the reason at my work there is so much Fortran code already written a lot of it dates back to the '80's. This is mostly fluid dynamics and thermo stuff the math hasn't changed in decades so there is little impetus to rewrite.

I am a Materials engineer I work with Chem/mech engineers on process modelling and simulation in an industrial plant.

You can kind of tell the vintage of programs around here by looking at the languages used.

There are Fortran programs from 80's to 90's.

From early to late 90's there are C++ programs.

Then from late 90's to mid 2000's there are VB6 programs (for a while our work was big on Microsoft, Visual Basic and Access was everywhere - boy did we get burned by that).

From mid 2000's to early 10's there are java programs.

Python seems to be goto nowadays.