Dr. Merkwürdigliebe was the first name that crossed my mind.

In my opinion, yes. I am an undergrad Physics student (senior) and had my first contact with Fortran in my third semester, in a course called Computational Physics I. We learned the basics of Fortran 77/90 and how to solve some numerical problems using it. We also simulated some interesting problems that amazes undergrad students such as chaotic oscillators, Magnus effect in action and a few other simple yet curious systems. I had already some programming experience, but most other students didn't. They got it quite quickly and I think this is due Fortran's simplicity.

Even if you are never going to use Fortran in your own projects, you will stumble on it now and then if you are going seriously into applied and theoretical research field. NASA, for example, has tons of production code written in Fortran and even new codes are written on it. Many many Physics and Chemistry groups around the world have their most important codes in Fortran, and sometimes they use clever hacks to make the code faster, so a minimum understanding of it is necessary. I work with a Computational Chemistry group and much of the code they still develop, even for new applications, is Fortran. It is good and solid code, they are very experienced on it, and they are not willing to change to another technology so easily.

As a first language I don't know if Fortran is the best, maybe Python or Java would be my choice in this case, but it is definitely worth learning.

You obviously know nothing about living in Brazil during the 90s.

Nowadays I mostly play only Go, both on the computer using KGS and on real boards when I am lucky enough to find people willing to play it. As a kid I used to spend a long time playing with my SNES, and later with N64, but then gaming consoles started getting way too expensive to fit in my budget, then I would only play on computers. Then a few years later I gave up Windows and started using exclusively Linux and BSD on my personal computers. I lost games, but found programming. Now, 10 years later, I look back and see it as a worthy deal.

The same way the DoD payed for the Cray supercomputers, gamers are paying for the GPUs. Science dropped by and said thanks.

OpenCL will hopefully help to set a solid ground for GPU and CPU parallel computing, and since it is not technically very different from CUDA, porting existing applications to OpenCL will not be a challenge. Nowadays with current massively parallel technology the hardest part is making the algorithms parallel, not programming any specific device.

I know you are trolling, but actually CUDA applications work better on Linux than on Windows. If you run a CUDA kernel on Windows that lasts longer than 5~6 seconds, your system will hang. The same will happen on Linux but then you can just disable the X server or have one card providing your graphical display and another one as your parallel co-processor.