No reason it should blow your mind. Aside from the fact that Fortran has been around decades longer than Elixir, it is still the language of choice for vast areas of the scientific and technical industries, because of certain ways it works that no other language offers for high-speed computation.
You are making a broad characterization of Fortran as superior in "certain ways" to other languages. I'd love to read a justification of that claim, perhaps in a blog post.
One could argue that because Cobol is the language of choice for large banks using mainframes, it is superior at doing tasks required by financial applications. Somehow I doubt that it has anything to do with that.
I did a quick Algolia search for stories posted in the last year on HN with "Fortran" in the title. I couldn't find any articles that compare Fortran language/compiler features with other languages. Maybe you could help me out?
