>Is any current language 100 times better than FORTRAN for programmer productivity, just as FORTRAN was compared to machine-code programming? Probably not.
I beg to differ. A well-designed Lisp, with the power of homoiconity (code-as-data, real macros), immutability by default and a sane model for concurrency. Running on the most optimized virtual machines (JVM, .NET CLR, JavaScript), with the ability to use all of their existing libraries.
I'm talking about Clojure.
How productive is a Clojure programmer when the requirement is to write a high -performance application which performs vector operations on large matrices?
Have a look at core.matrix (https://github.com/mikera/core.matrix) and vectorz.clj (https://github.com/mikera/vectorz-clj) libs. They give you almost native speeds.
If you need even more performance, checkout neanderthal (https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal) which has a GPU back-end.