> Fortran has seen major changes over the 64 years it's been in use.
And yet most Fortran programmers reject/ignore those changes and stick to Fortran 77. When I was in academia, I couldn't find a single person writing Fortran code in anything newer than 77.
My experience with that convinced me that many academic Fortran users are cargo cult programmers to the extreme. They're "taught" by examining the code written by their advisor's advisor's advisor who may have properly learned F77 back in 1980, but no one else did.
Even then, FORTRAN 77 is a major change over FORTRAN (1957 and even the later FORTRAN 66). Specifically, that's the version that got structured programming elements added to the language. Having once inherited some pre-F77 code (well, it was F77 by the time I got it, but was started before then and that was obvious by its almost complete lack of structured programming), I can say that F77 is a substantially improved language over the prior versions.
> Even then, FORTRAN 77 is a major change over FORTRAN (1957 and even the later FORTRAN 66).
That's because FORTRAN is one of the oldest languages, and you'd expect lots of changes as the whole field develops. If you use that as a metric, most languages will appear stagnant. Python hasn't changed much in the last 20 years, for example.
Interesting, my experience was the opposite, everyone (1) was writing Fortran 95'ish. Might not have been the most beautiful code, but they took extensive advantage of the major F95 features like modules and array syntax.
(1) Except that one old beard who was convinced F77 was the ultimate, and everything newer was crap.
And yet most Fortran programmers reject/ignore those changes and stick to Fortran 77. When I was in academia, I couldn't find a single person writing Fortran code in anything newer than 77.