[btrettel]

I get the impression that you think that Fortran is a bad language for science.

Modern Fortran is a nice language for many scientific computing tasks. For me, I like Fortran because it's basically the easiest statically-typed compiled language (I rarely have to think about pointers, for instance), it's basically as fast as C, it has some good features for my variety of scientific computing (arrays in particular), and it has many compilers. Certainly, a better language could be designed without the legacy baggage and some features I'd like (better generics in particular), but I haven't seen anything better yet myself.

Now, legacy FORTRAN (note caps) is often a mess. It wasn't until the Fortran 90 standard that the capitalization changed, and the language changed a lot with that standard as well. I suspect the issues that you're seeing are more from many scientists not modernizing, and not from Fortran in itself.

[piva00]

No, not at all, I didn't want to imply that, simply noted that Fortran is still used a lot in science and that scientists would greatly benefit from programmers to mentor them on how to write code in whatever language in a better way.

[aragilar]

https://software-carpentry.org/ has been around for over 10 years.

Also, software engineers without the requisite background are usually worse for a project (and for teaching researchers) than anyone else.