The new revisions of Fortran are actually quite nice to work with. I had a month of using fortran in a company I worked in and reworked some Fortran 70 code into a more recent version (Fortran 2000?). It overall felt more high level than plain C. Eventually I also ported the code to Python and Cython and while the cython implementation actually was more performant (arrays were always allocated with fixed sizes in Fortran and in python it was easy to pick just the right sizes), the Fortran implementation was fairly readable