3 ms·

One of the co-founders of the fortran-lang effort. Actually, I would say it is as official as it can be. If you google "fortran", it comes up as first. We provi

by certik 3y ago

One of the co-founders of the fortran-lang effort. Actually, I would say it is as official as it can be. If you google "fortran", it comes up as first. We provide the home for all of fortran, all of the compilers (commercial and open source), documentation, forum, etc. Wikipedia lists fortran-lang.org as the webpage. Both of the initial co-founders of fortran-lang are part of the standards committee (but the fortran-lang effort is now much bigger than them), and many of the standards committee members are participating in the discourse. I don't think it is the job of the ISO Fortran Standards Committee to maintain a website and a discussion forum, but rather the job is to standardize the language. So it is a complementary effort. To maintain the language has to be an effort of the whole Fortran community, which includes users, compiler writers, the standards committee, and anybody who is able to help.

pletnes 3y ago
That’s good news! Fortran has always suffered from too few online resources of good quality. No wonder people prefer other languages - I bought some used Metcalf books, but an online, searchable reference is much better. I didn’t intend to say that «not official» means «bad». I learned a lot of stuff from «non-official web pages» over the years.
- certik 3y ago
  > I didn’t intend to say that «not official» means «bad». Yes, I know, I understood that. Thank you. I was reacting to the term official, since it is an interesting question what official means for Fortran, since in a way it was "abandoned", there was the ISO committee as the only official body, but nobody wanted to provide an official place for it on the internet (the most official place was actually the Fortran Wikipedia article). So we volunteered that. In a way, I think it could already be treated as official, or if not, hopefully in a few years most people will treat it as the de-facto official. Kind of like the git webpage has migrated from https://repo.or.cz/ https://repo.or.cz/ to https://git-scm.com/ https://git-scm.com/, but both in a way are unofficial, but the second one is a nice modern webpage and most people liked it and accepted it as official. I don't know the people behind either webpage.

by certik 3y ago

pletnes 3y ago

That’s good news! Fortran has always suffered from too few online resources of good quality. No wonder people prefer other languages - I bought some used Metcalf books, but an online, searchable reference is much better. I didn’t intend to say that «not official» means «bad». I learned a lot of stuff from «non-official web pages» over the years.

certik 3y ago
> I didn’t intend to say that «not official» means «bad». Yes, I know, I understood that. Thank you. I was reacting to the term official, since it is an interesting question what official means for Fortran, since in a way it was "abandoned", there was the ISO committee as the only official body, but nobody wanted to provide an official place for it on the internet (the most official place was actually the Fortran Wikipedia article). So we volunteered that. In a way, I think it could already be treated as official, or if not, hopefully in a few years most people will treat it as the de-facto official. Kind of like the git webpage has migrated from https://repo.or.cz/ https://repo.or.cz/ to https://git-scm.com/ https://git-scm.com/, but both in a way are unofficial, but the second one is a nice modern webpage and most people liked it and accepted it as official. I don't know the people behind either webpage.