[bbatha]

I wish that were true. I’ve worked on a lot of old FORTRAN code bases (including a couple that started life as punch cards) and it just doesn’t bear out. Remember FORTRAN comes from an era we’re people we’re concerned about the overhead of a function call. Programmers also worried about he memory overhead of comments in their editor! Most FORTRAN is a mess of gotos, common blocks, implicit types and other relics that should be left to the past. This code doesn’t age well either, optimizers don’t do well with gotos and the lack of function calls means that there are copy and pasted snippets of what my coworkers and I called “fassembly” that were untranslatable. One time I spent days translating one of these functions only to realize that it was an fft, I swapped it out with one from a library that had be optimized for decades the code was easier to read and 100x faster. I’m not even going to discuss any code base that was unfortunate to need any kind of string manipulation. To cap it off FORTRAN 77 doesn’t even allow variables with names longer than six characters.

That all said, modern FORTRAN is entirely pleasant language. Just stay away from the legacy.