[exdsq]

You joke but I still see FORTRAN jobs around where I live than Ruby. I even worked for a consultancy that did a Matlab -> FORTRAN rewrite.

[tossup8536]

Fortran is super fast. For math/analytical stuff it's preffered over C. But to avoid relyance on a language with so few devs, these orgs dhould only have code that the the heavy lifting math in fortran. And use expose those as wrspped functions to some other more common and easier to use/mantain/hire

[Koshkin]

Indeed - with its stricter semantics Fortran is much easier for the compiler to generate a highly optimized machine code for.