That was primarily because of no memory aliasing in the older versions (and hence why most BLAS libs are made in it). Other languages with no aliasing issues either, like rust, can theoretically compile to the same speed as fortran for pure number work (these are often the cases when rust outperforms C/C++ for otherwise identical code).
F# is quite nice, basically it’s just a .NET OCaml (you can even copy/paste most OCaml code in and it will just work, that don’t use higher typed modules that is, it bugs me that F# lacks those as they are so crazy useful, instead F# going the .NET style of ugly dynamic dispatch instead) with extra features on top since then too (F# moves faster than OCaml, though it is also less uniformly designed than OCaml, some questionable things added, where OCaml drills it to pieces before they add in something new to make sure it’s the best it can be nowadays).