I wonder: is there any reason beyond sheer curiosity* to learn Fortran in 2025? Not being snarky, genuinely curious about what Fortran brings to the table.

* Nothing wrong with that as a reason, of course

Yes; I am seriously thinking of getting the "Modern Fortran Explained" book (https://academic.oup.com/book/56095). Modern Fortran has everything (Procedural, OO, Functional, Multithreading, Parallel etc. features) that all modern languages have. I would say it is no longer "just" for numerical computing. Excellent libraries/ecosystem, a well supported and stable language, fantastic optimization right out of the box etc. makes it a great general purpose language.

Fortran in Modern Scientific Computing: An Unexpected Comeback - https://medium.com/@stack1/fortran-in-modern-scientific-comp...

5 Reasons Why Fortran is Still Used - https://www.matecdev.com/posts/why-fortran-still-used.html

Is Fortran better than Python for teaching the basics of numerical linear algebra? - https://loiseaujc.github.io/posts/blog-title/fortran_vs_pyth...

I take back everything i said about FORTRAN - https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/1745542049284423973

Modern Fortran online tutorial - https://wvuhpc.github.io/Modern-Fortran/

I suspect that nearly all of the Fortran code that will exist ten years from now already exists today, so knowing the language is a skill that is more likely to be useful to you for performance testing and code porting than for new development.

The trickiest part of really learning Fortran today is that it is hard to define what the language is, apart from the practical definition imposed by what its seven or so surviving compilers accept and how they interpret it. There are near-universally portable features that are not part of the ISO standard; there are standard features that are not at all portable, or not available at all anywhere. So what one should know as “Fortran” is its reasonably portable intersection of features across multiple compilers, and there isn’t a good practical book that will teach you that.

Yes. Some scientific computing code is still being developed in Fortran eg in HPC. (and has been for decades)

Fortran is still the best way to write scientific computing codes for HPC environments. And not just because of legacy code. You know how all those language benchmarks have C as the reference class (and fastest)? Fortran is faster still, by a significant margin.