La publicación en línea Software Development Times (SD Times), The Industry Newspaper for Software Development Managers, publicó el pasado 15 de Abril de 2004 un artículo de opinión de Malcolm Cohen, consultor técnico principal de la compañía Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd. (NAG), en el que presenta las ventajas de la nueva generación de Fortran, Fortran 2003, frente a los populares lenguajes de programación Java, Visual Basic, C/C++ y C#. El artículo comienza así:

The nature of today's computing challenges, and the direction in which many commercial and research areas are moving, is taking on more complicated problems that involve far more code. When you add to the complexity of problems, the various languages with numeric computing capabilities do not rise to the tasks at hand equally. For many numerical computational problems, Fortran and C are comparable when it comes to computational speed. However, from the numeric point of view, Fortran is inherently safer for certain operations, as compared with C. Fortran's key focus is on highly dependable numerical facilities. If one is equally familiar with computing in any of these languages, and more or less language-neutral in orientation, one commonly concludes that Fortran is the superior alternative.