Absolutely; modern Fortran is great and is syntactically rather close to Matlab (and to an extent R as well).<p>The main difficulty with Fortran is IMO the lack of an extensive standard library -- sure, you can find code out there to do almost anything, but then you need to figure out linking&#x2F;calling conventions&#x2F;possibly incompatible data models for each new library you bring in...<p>But, as another poster mentioned, it is quite straightforward to call Fortran from R :)