Fortran vs. IronPython vs. Racket vs. Ruby Comparison Chart

Fortran has been designed from the ground up for computationally intensive applications in science and engineering. Mature and battle-tested compilers and libraries allow you to write code that runs close to the metal, fast. Fortran is statically and strongly typed, which allows the compiler to catch many programming errors early on for you. This also allows the compiler to generate efficient binary code. Fortran is a relatively small language that is surprisingly easy to learn and use. Expressing most mathematical and arithmetic operations over large arrays is as simple as writing them as equations on a whiteboard. Fortran is a natively parallel programming language with intuitive array-like syntax to communicate data between CPUs. You can run almost the same code on a single CPU, on a shared-memory multicore system, or on a distributed-memory HPC or cloud-based system.

Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language that serves as a modern dialect of Lisp and a descendant of Scheme. It is designed as a platform for programming language design and implementation, enabling developers to create new domain-specific and general-purpose languages. Racket's core language includes features such as macros, modules, lexical closures, tail calls, delimited continuations, parameters (fluid variables), software contracts, green threads, and OS threads. The language also comes with primitives, such as event spaces and custodians, which control resource management and enable the language to act like an operating system for loading and managing other programs. Further extensions to the language are created with the powerful macro system, which, together with the module system and custom parsers, can control all aspects of a language. Most language constructs in Racket are implemented as macros in the base language.