I honestly am not too sure why there is so much derision regarding Fortran (ageism?). A lot of people don't seem to realize the importance this language still has in scientific computing.
Fortran has moved on, even if you professor hasn't.
I know of 4 major languages created in the 1950's: Lisp, Algol, Fortran, and Cobol. Lisp and Algol were brilliantly designed, years ahead of their time, and have inspired nearly every programming language since then. Fortran and Cobol not only look like evolutionary dead ends in hindsight, but they weren't pleasant to use even when they were popular.
There's a reason we still see Lisp posts on HN almost every day, and very rarely Fortran posts.
Although, I don't guess it's any worse than wanting to use your client-side scripting language for your server, or you database query language.