Why physicists still use Fortran
It is simply due to apprenticeship. Physicists do research, and their code is research code. Like most other research, the research code is maintained and used in-house. As most in-house non-shared code (in any language), it is impenetrable unless you take apprenticeship. The masters are typically old and FORTRAN is their language and it is the only choice for the apprentices. Once the apprentices graduate and become masters themselves, they further developed their own in-house code and it is inevitably in FORTRAN too. As any over-developed code, it is too expensive to migrate even when the new master recognize the shortcoming. The bottom line, FORTRAN is not bad once you are familiar with (and invested in) it, so FORTRAN persists over another generation of apprentices ...<p>However, there is slight change. The new generation of masters often do know other languages, so they sometime tolerate their new apprentices to use other language and still able to teach them. So at this point, by far, not all physicists use FORTRAN.<p>FORTRAN will die out, just takes time.<p>One of the sticking point is the library BLAS&#x2F;LAPACK. It is in FORTRAN. Or more precisely, its interface is in FORTRAN. I don&#x27;t foresee this will change for a long time. So FORTRAN will be like COBOL, it will persist even when no-one really use it anymore.