[dannyz]

Base Fortran has a lot of advantages for scientific programming over other languages, but I think there are two factors that are contributing to it's unpopularity:

1. Models are increasingly becoming much larger projects where flexibility, configuration, setup, are just as important as the actual number crunching that's done. These aren't areas that Fortran is known for.

2. The existence of libraries like Eigen for c++ provide most, if not close to all, of the advantages that Fortran gives for number crunching.