I use Fortran for some research codes (I also use Julia and C++). The main advantage of Fortran, to me, is that it is very easy to write very fast code, and has very few foot-guns. The latter property also means it can be quite difficult to do non-numerical stuff, but that's a great trade-off if you're a physicist or engineer wanting to write simulations. The name comes from "Formula Translation" for a reason. Doing the kinds of multi-dimensional array manipulation and linear algebra you can do with out-of-the-box Fortran in C or C++ feels like torture.

I generally prefer Julia, as its a more general-purpose language, but there are parts of Fortran I like better than Julia, such as

- Fortran uses static typing and is statically-compiled

- It's a lot easier to write slow Julia code than I'd like, and you generally need to think more to make code fast than you do in Fortran.

However, I think Julia beats Fortran in most everything else. My main gripe with Fortran these days is 1) lack of a decent default package manager (FPM seems great, but most Fortran codes don't use it) and 2) slow evolution due to the conservative standards committee. I don't understand why we still can't have extremely basic generics in 2023, or a simple string type.