[Extigy]

I’ve worked with several Fortran projects before. Modern Fortran is actually quite nice to work with once you get into the swing of it.

I think the language itself and the surrounding tooling aren’t really causing the image problem. The real issue is when people inherit some older code originally written in the 70s. They then have to work with, and form opinions of, the style of FORTRAN common at that time.

This is particularly common in academia, where a student might inherit decades old code for simulating some physical scenario from their advisor. Modernising the code base gives little direct research benefit, and if that student has not seen much or any Fortran before they are going to end up learning the ancient F77 style anyway as they make tweaks to the code.