> A lot of the things you're talking about are for general programming for which Fortran is not well suited.
The article is about teaching programming in general, not teaching it for computational needs:
> in any respects modern Fortran is an exceptionally good language to teach programming in
> Partially it is because modern Fortran is easy to read and comprehend, which is an important factor for the individual learning to program for the first time.
> The idea of introductory languages is not necessarily that they are suited to commercial endeavours, but rather that they are (i) easy to implement algorithm in, (ii) readable, and (iii) do not contain things that will confuse and bewilder.
You can also see his prior blog posts where again he is speaking about learning programming in general - not limited to computation.
When evaluating what is good for beginners it helps to remember not all beginners approach programming from the same place. Traditionally computational scientists were a distinct and equal in size subset of the users of computer resources in academic and industry research centers accross the nation, specifically distinct from computer scientists. Today they are smaller total fraction but that history continues to inform how they approach computation and mentor new scientists learning to use computers for science, which diverges from the way computer scientists do both in approach and requisite mental model.