Since there's a lot of effort in this thread to deconstruct the joke, I just want to add that FORTRAN is probably reference to the classic "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" [1]. In fact, the whole comment would fit there nicely.

> If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.

[1] https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html