[quanto]

> Fortran is a pretty simple looking language and would probably be the closest to Julia in terms of speed and expressiveness, but the writing is on the wall and Fortran's days are numbered. I am not aware of many new packages being developed using it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Fortran, both the language itself and the packages in the ecosystem, is continually developed. There are a few peer-reviewed studies that quantitatively tracked Fortran usages and concluded that Fortran is not just for legacy code -- people actually continue to write new packages precisely for the reasons you mentioned (expressivity, performance)

[CoreyFieldens]

Could you link to some of those papers? I would be interested in learning more about the frontier of Fortran development. I recently learned about the LFortran project and while I think it's an interesting project, I feared it would be too late for the language.

[pjmlp]

I guess one thing would be to catch up with all the ISO releases since late 90's.

"Modern Fortran" book would be one way of doing it,

https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran

[zorked]

Fortran is a case of a language that has grown below the trend of the industry. There are probably more active Fortran projects and developer now than at any point in history. But it became a smaller piece of the much larger pie so people think it's "dead".

Same goes with Perl - probably more Perl developers than at its heyday in the 90s but a smaller chunk of the overall picture. Measure by noise levels and anything that doesn't explode seems to be dying.