I agree, Fortran is easy to learn, and it's a pretty small language so you can keep it all in your head. The part about Fortran that I find hard is the "culture" around it. There are styles of programming in Fortran that just don't work with my brain. Just like the "Java culture" of extreme abstraction (i.e FactoryFactoryBuilderHelper classes) bothers me too.
I can start a fresh Fortran program and write it out pretty quickly (though I do miss native dictionaries), but when I have to collaborate with an old-school Fortran programmer (especially one trained on FORTRAN 77) it's pretty tough for me. I have to reprogram my brain to think in that style/culture.
I tend to do most of my high performance numerical stuff in Numpy since it defers to the Fortran libraries for the hard stuff. I haven't found any properly written vectorized code get bottlenecked in the interpreter.
I can start a fresh Fortran program and write it out pretty quickly (though I do miss native dictionaries), but when I have to collaborate with an old-school Fortran programmer (especially one trained on FORTRAN 77) it's pretty tough for me. I have to reprogram my brain to think in that style/culture.
I tend to do most of my high performance numerical stuff in Numpy since it defers to the Fortran libraries for the hard stuff. I haven't found any properly written vectorized code get bottlenecked in the interpreter.