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Fortran actually isn't a static language. It's evolved over time. The last significant revision according to wikipedia is just over a year old. The beauty and horror of it probably depends which era of it you're looking at.
Which suggests that the biggest source of horror would be that most code you'll come across was written by a non-programmer who is intelligent enough to translate an extremely complicated and niche problem domain into very clever and completely un-idiomatic code, who likely was unable to read their own library mere months after graduating because most PhDs don't fully understand their own thesis within months after graduating.
Fortran actually isn't a static language. It's evolved over time. The last significant revision according to wikipedia is just over a year old. The beauty and horror of it probably depends which era of it you're looking at.
In the late 90s I remember a saying roughly "I don't know what language scientists will be using in 20 years, but it will probably be named Fortran"
EDIT: for a modern, relatively new and highly-used scientific codebase that uses Fortran90 exclusively, see PFLOTRAN: https://bitbucket.org/pflotran/pflotran/src/master/
Every day we drift further from god.
I'm not picking on your metaphor, but I don't understand it either. Mind elaborating?
Also see COBOL on Cogs, http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
> Fortran never left us... it runs our mainframes today. What? That's where you lost me.
IIRC, FORTRAN is used heavily in the LINPACK/LAPACK libraries which are further used in higher level libraries such as numpy. So it’s likely true that it still sees use in control software running trains, banks, air traffic control, etc.