As someone working with scientific codes in (relatively) modern Fortran, I agree that Fortran is still very strong in its niche. I don’t know any other language that makes it as easy to write fast numerical codes, and it’s relatively hard to accidentally mess up the performance.

That said, I still find it very much feels outdated as soon as you veer off its core features. Handling strings is a major pain, writing short functions feels overly verbose, and proper testing is difficult. The language is full of arcane details that require reading up on best practices even for simple things such as defining the precision of your numbers.

So while Fortran still is strong in some areas, I do see it as an outdated language, just one that doesn’t really have a good replacement yet. Hopefully Julia can replace it for most use cases, or maybe Rust if they figure out their HPC story.