[mumblemumble]

Fortran's primary competitive advantage over C and C++ is that it's a conceptually simpler language that's easier for humans to use safely and effectively for numerical computing tasks.

It's not just being tied to BLAS and friends. Fortran lives on in academia, for example, because academics don't necessarily want to put a lot of effort into chasing wild pointers or grokking the standard template library.

For my part, I'm watching LFortran with interest because, when I run up against limitations on what I can do with numpy, I'd much rather turn to Fortran than C, C++, or Rust if at all possible, because Fortran would let me get the job done in less time, and the code would likely be quite a bit more readable.