It seems that every time this gets brought up online a sea of infamous Fortran-programming-economists always tell you how fast Fortran is compared to everything else, signing it with "Fortran or GTFO". I've met hundreds/thousands of economists and econ grad students at schools ranked from 1 to 200, and I don't recall a single one that actually used Fortran (I'm sure there is a non-zero quantity -- I probably just haven't cared to talk with them b/c they are most likely macro theorists).
The fact of the matter is that in economics graduate school, your professors could care less what language you use. It isn't an algorithm competition, it's a story telling competition. But the type of story telling economists do is no less noble than writing elegant algos. Writing a story based on economic mechanisms and behaviors and supporting it with quality data, sound statistics, and logical/exact theories is no simple task.