With vector machines, Fortran yielded (much) faster code because (a) there was a whole lot of work on preprocessors for "dusty deck" code and (b) the lack of pointers and their overlap let the compilers do their stuff. C code needed a lot of #pragma's to let it know that some pointers didn't overlap and so could be optimized.
replyWe found it best to to the front-end and I/O of the code in C and the compute in Fortran. Fastest calculations especially with those tailored libraries.
Aren't most people doing this kind of work these days engineers using matlab?
replyFortran invented array-based programming, which arguably numpy advanced and now Julia finally perfected
replyFortran had arrays since the beginning, but it wasn't really for "array-based programming" except in a trivial sense, since expressions could not produce arrays. APL is the language that invented first-class arrays, and is far more advanced at it than most of its successors, particularly including NumPy.
replyModern Fortran has pretty serviceable support for array programming.