Rather than mastering a bunch of programming languages they should have focused on one and built clout as a problem solver that doesn’t see a new shiny tool as a way to label their career. Boring popular language + focusing on building stuff and solving problems are the key to actual career growth.
BTW if you run fancy modern stuff like numpy, you run quite some Fortran, because it includes, for instance, BLAS.
For aliasing, in C, there's the restrict keyword, although it isn't used that often. If you take a look at BLIS or even BLAS, restrict isn't used. C++ doesn't have restrict, but that hasn't stopped the development of great numerical linear algebra libraries like Eigen or Armadillo.
C++ has had std::complex for... forever. And C99 has support for complex numbers.
Range types are handy, but not having them typically isn't a show stopper when designing libraries of numerical kernels. They are more useful for high-level prototyping, a la MATLAB. Nevertheless, it's not that hard to emulate the behavior using a well-designed API in C, or operator overloading in C++.
The only parallelism that Fortran has that C or C++ lack is co-array Fortran. I haven't used it myself, so can't speak to how useful it is. Both C and C++ have many options for parallelism: pthreads, OpenMP, MPI, C++'s parallel stuff, and tons of other libraries.
I'm not sure what "robust structured/procedural programming" is. I think Fortran is at a clear disadvantage compared to C and C++, here. The amount of boilerplate needed to define a function in Fortran is pretty painful. Fortran's control flow is a subset of C and C++'s, so any style of structured or procedural programming you would do in Fortran can obviously be done in C and C++.
And of course, numpy (and similar) call out to Fortran, but they call out to loads of C and C++, too!
This isn't to say Fortran is a bad language. I work with people who use it and prefer it. But the reasons you pointed out simply aren't valid. A good reason to use Fortran: you work in a group where Fortran is the language that's used and you want to be able to contribute to what's going on!
Sometimes it makes sense to simply reset things.
1.) How can we eliminate undefined behavior?
2.) without sacrificing any performance
From there, they built a powerful programming language that has always honored zero cost abstractions and elimination of undefined behavior. This is like a 15 year development and the result is a little hard to understand at first but one of the most innovative things in the realm of systems programming [that people are actually using at scale]. I know Rust borrows a lot and is built on the shoulders of giants and is not a singular invention, but it is slowly winning hearts and minds in places where languages like Ocaml and Haskell never could. You really could not do something like this by saying "Hey, how could we eliminate UB in C++?" Starting anew was the solution :)
What kind of argument is that?
> We can innovate without throwing things away, even if it may seem boring to the uninitiated.
You can’t innovate without breaking backwards compatibility. C++ is an evolutionary dead end that collapses under its own complexity, deal with it.
I completely agree that if you want to be a career programmer, focus on solving problems for business. But it can be done in any language nowadays.
Your knowledge never gets old, basically in C++.
The problem with C++ is that it is a horrible language in several ways. I guess the root cause is that it's basically a sugared C preprocessor with an infinite amount of special rules and special cases, that attempts to retain backward compatibility while adding new features. If my domain did not need it I would not write it. But it does, so I do.
My advice not to choose C++ because of career stability meant - "It's a bloody awful thing! Don't choose it if you have options unless you absolutely want to!"
Yes.
Choosing something which us not C++ may be a long-term goal by itself.