[bee_rider]

I think you've made a slightly bigger claim than is necessary, which has lead to a focus on BLAS, which misses the point.

The best BLAS libraries use C and Assembly. This is because BLAS is the de-facto standard interface for Linear Algebra code, and so it is worthwhile to optimize it to an extreme degree (given infinite programmer-hours, C can beat any language, because you can embed assembly in C).

But for those numerical codes which aren't incredibly hand-optimized, Fortran makes nice assumptions, it should be able to optimize the output of a moderately skilled programmer pretty well (hey we aren't all experts, right?).