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FORTRAN 2003 Accepted as Standard
GraWil writes "Despite the nay sayers citing its death in 1965, the FORTRAN standards committee has now released the final FORTRAN 2003 specification. In an announcement to the comp.lang.fortran group, Michael Metcalf annouced that 'Fortran 2003 has passed its ballot with flying colours: 20 yeses, 0 noes, 8 abstains.' Strictly speaking, the 2003 and past standards are not freely available but drafts can be found online. FORTRAN 2003 is an upwardly-compatible extension of the current standard, FORTRAN 95, adding and extending support for exception handling, object-oriented programming, and improved interoperability with the C language. In other FORTRAN news, the GNU FORTRAN 95 compiler has made amazing progress over the past year. Gfortran will be part of gcc-4.0 when released (probably in 2005)."
Disclaimer: I have an M.Sci in physics with a slant towards computational physics. I'm most familiar with F90 but its advantages should apply to the later revisions as well.
Fortran is a slightly higher-level language than C. It has lots of math capabilities built-in; particularly matrix types and operations meaning good potential for parallel processing. Decent compilers can produce multiprocessor and MMX/SSE code from Fortran, and probably the equivalent on non-x86 platforms. I'm not sure if you can do this in C portably.
Fortran has a fairly simple overall syntax where newlines matter. I found it very easy to learn, having some experience with Python and C. In some ways the syntax is rather arcane but at least it's quite clear (compared to C or Perl at least IMHO).
Fortran does have pointers, but they are unnecessary because of other memory handling methods (namespaces or 'modules'). Dynamic memory allocation is a bit quirky IMHO, but way simpler than in C.
The language feels well suited for physicists. It's not necessarily good for general programming, but I'd happily use it for many speed-critical sections instead of C.
One important reason for the persistence of Fortran is the number of libraries for computational sciences, for example LAPACK. They can be included in modern Fortran programs despite being written in F77. There have been a number of attempts to make a scripting front-end for these libraries; Matlab is one of them, even though its F77 roots are not very visible.
The common complaints about Fortran are mostly true for F77 and older revisions. F77 is a truly horrible language, and it has none of the nice features that make F90+ good for scientific computing.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The article talks about GFORTRAN being released with the next GCC, but then links to G95 on sourceforge. From reading the gcc.gnu.org list trsffic, G95 was orginally on sourceforge, but then forked when its main developer wouldn't cooperate with anybody else, especially the GCC people. The fork was GFORTRAN, and it will be GFORTRAN, not the g95.sf.net project, which gets released.
I think the main reason is that Fortran can describe the problem space in ways that scientists can use well (and hence is maintainable) and C handles the rest fine.
I don't understand why some many younger people are so quick to put older languages down, my sister has made a small fortune maintaining / extending COBOL apps for various financial institutions using more or less the same method (C & COBOL together). I guess it's because they've never understood the various problem spaces to begin with and see the world in a web-centric sort of way.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.