Critically, though, it's not the same Fortran.

Fortran 2008 is VERY different from FORTRAN 77.

Very good point! I find the structure of modern Fortran very clear (although somewhat verbose compared to same python).

check out the new impressive built-in parallel features in Fortran 2018 here: https://goo.gl/ZbH4t7 GFortran 8.1 has already implemented the majority of it, and Intel is already adding the new features to their new Intel Fortran 2019. I don't know of any other mainstream language at the moment, that has native shared- and distributed-memory parallelism capabilities based on one-sided communications without recourse to the complex ugly out-of-language MPI library calls.