Potential of the Julia programming language for high energy physics computing
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
'The Julia community’s interests are well aligned with HEP, and many Julia users are in the sciences. We see this in some design choices inherited from existing technical languages (Fortran, R, MATLAB, Wolfram), like 1-based indexing, column-major arrays, and builtin N-dimensional arrays, and also in the effort placed on interoperability with other languages'
Later they say that a "key feature" of Julia is
'A single implementation, rather than an abstract language specification with multiple slightly incompatible implementations. The Julia computing platform is primarily implemented in Julia (most parts), C, and C++ (LLVM), and it has a built-in REPL.'
OTOH, the existence of an ISO standard with multiple implementations can benefit the portability and longevity of code.
The LFortran Fortran compiler is not as mature as gfortran or Intel's ifort/ifx, compilers, but it does have a built-in REPL.
This is true for ISO standards that actually standardize features. Fortran's standard, since F'90, has instead been inventing features, and doing so without prototyping in actual implementations. And without supplying standardized test suites to guide those implementations. The results, in actual practice, have been at best mixed. There are features that are "standard" but not at all portable, due to spotty and divergent implementations, and there are portable features that are not standard. Some features have been in the language for >=20 years without yet appearing in popular compilers.
So yes, standardization (ISO or otherwise) can be a good thing. But it hasn't really been so for Fortran. And I think things are getting worse; F'2023 has changes in it that actually silently change the behavior of existing standard-conforming code, which would have been viewed as an abomination in earlier days.
References: see the LLVM Flang documentation on extensions, non-standard features, &c. in https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/flang/docs/Ex... and a suite of various incompatible feature tests in https://github.com/klausler/fortran-wringer-tests .