In this article, we compare the support for SIMD instructions for Julia and Fortran. The comparison is carried out according to the methodology described in work of T. Kalibera, R. E. Jones. The first part of the article gives a brief description of this technique. We emphasize on the practical implementation using Python, NumPy and SciPy. The second part of the article briefly discusses the syntactic capabilities of Fortran and Julia to work with SIMD processor extensions. Specific code snippets are given. Next, the performance of Julia and Fortran is compared for arithmetic operations on arrays of small length. The results are presented in tabular and graphical form. © 2019 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.