Exactly. I'm a numerical scientist (does a lot of oceanography) who started out around 1989 in c "for speed". After 15 years of wrestling with hand rolling up, unrolling, threading, rolling for the simplest matrix multiplication, someone said "you should try modern Fortran, it's not like F77 was when you started."

my GOD what a breath of fresh air. Natural array expressions, operations slicing, sizing, etc. (talking about the core language not libraries) and incredible, incredible speed. Revolutionary, and makes me deeply regret those years I recited the "c is fast" mantra.

Mind you, the compiler that handles the optimizations is written in c. But you know - I don't need to know about that;in c, I always felt like I was half writing-the-compiler anyway. Thankfully, I'm not anymore.

Now the thing is, I tell people this and they look at me like I'm crazy ("fortran? no way!") This article... I love a little validation.