[lutusp]

> Fortran is still evolving (albeit even more slowly than Java) and still used for new projects.

If it weren't for the fact that there is a huge trove of valuable legacy Fortran code, if Fortran were introduced today as a new language with no archive of existing Fortran programs, on its intrinsic merits it would be laughed off the stage. On that thought experiment's basis, Fortran continues to exist in order to support legacy code.

There are systems present in society of very high value that require Fortran to remain available, and some of them have famously undertaken to replace their Fortran code base at very high cost, and failed. So we have Fortran, and will continue to have Fortran, simply because of the very ambitious projects that were written in Fortran that we still need.