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out of curiosity, why fortran? no disrespect. I wrote a lot of scientific software in the earlier days of my career and I learned fortran to update ocean modeli

out of curiosity, why fortran? no disrespect. I wrote a lot of scientific software in the earlier days of my career and I learned fortran to update ocean modeling software.

pklausler 7mo ago
maybe they weren't really concerned about portability or a decent standard?
- FormerLabFred 7mo ago
  It’s keyboard navigation only, and we got the Bluesky firehose raw straight into the Rust decoder. Or we switch mode to Jetstream with m+EnTER :) You hit l+ENTER to like a post. If anyone replies from Bluesky, we hit n+ENTER and see the notifs. And so on Fortransky is 70% Fortran, rest is Rust, C and a tiny Python helper
enriquto 7mo ago
> why fortran? why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.
- FormerLabFred 7mo ago
  Fortran will survive the cockroaches even, when the world 404s
- pklausler 7mo ago
  Your code will work unchanged until you try to change compilers or your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language.
  - kergonath 7mo ago
    > your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language Like all the 3 of them they added in the last 30 years, and that compiler vendors are not enforcing anyway because they don’t want to annoy their users? Windows’ backward compatibility is a joke compared to Fortran.
    - pklausler 7mo ago
      We're definitely enforcing some of them. But the latest one from F'2023 isn't going to be.
- deadbabe 7mo ago
  Great, can we see some benchmarks?
  - FormerLabFred 7mo ago
    Cobolsky holds the record for most surprised looks per line of code :) Fortransky benchmarks pending the feed scorer will have real numbers worth reporting Whenever time allows in future: Fortran vs Go vs Python
- foxglacier 7mo ago
  Yea na, Fortran is pretty compiler dependent and there are a lot of compilers. Already old Fortran code used all sorts of now-dead proprietary compilers and can take a huge effort to get it to compile on modern compilers or even modern computers. Modern code might use Gfortran which sometimes makes breaking changes so that's not an option. Perhaps if everyone uses the latest shiny new Flang or whatever, then it'll finally last 50 years? Not likely, given the history.
  - pklausler 7mo ago
    For a standardized language, Fortran isn’t very portable across compilers. GNU Fortran has done a great job supporting legacy features, and I hope that our work in flang-new has made it easy to port to, as well. I basically ignored the zealots who wanted flang-new to be a strict compiler by default. The hobbyist project LFortran is quite the opposite, and will yell at you by default for perfectly conforming variations in keyword spelling. For those who like that sort of thing, that’s exactly the sort of thing that they like.
FormerLabFred 7mo ago
You are not the first one to ask :) We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon. Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :) When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc. Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty. Both Cobolsky and Fortransky looks great on Swordfish90’s cool-retro-term, but we are building our own terminal for Fortransky too. There is a blog post with screenshots over at Patreon/formerlab Can’t get enough Fortran
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it If you don't mind me asking, why is the world better with more Fortran-based software?
  - FormerLabFred 7mo ago
    Our modern languages are built on it, and it’s incredibly fast, so it deserves to be kept alive. We owe a great deal to the people who wrote it in the 1950s I guess
    - embedding-shape 7mo ago
      > Our modern languages are built on it It's part of the lineage, yeah, probably started with Algol though? Fast I guess is always nice, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep it alive solely for that, at least to me.
      - mathieudombrock 7mo ago
        I think the best answer you're really going to get here is that it's cool and fun to learn and use old languages.
        embedding-shape 7mo ago

out of curiosity, why fortran? no disrespect. I wrote a lot of scientific software in the earlier days of my career and I learned fortran to update ocean modeling software.

pklausler 7mo ago

maybe they weren't really concerned about portability or a decent standard?

FormerLabFred 7mo ago
It’s keyboard navigation only, and we got the Bluesky firehose raw straight into the Rust decoder. Or we switch mode to Jetstream with m+EnTER :) You hit l+ENTER to like a post. If anyone replies from Bluesky, we hit n+ENTER and see the notifs. And so on Fortransky is 70% Fortran, rest is Rust, C and a tiny Python helper

enriquto 7mo ago

> why fortran? why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.

FormerLabFred 7mo ago
Fortran will survive the cockroaches even, when the world 404s
pklausler 7mo ago
Your code will work unchanged until you try to change compilers or your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language.
- kergonath 7mo ago
  > your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language Like all the 3 of them they added in the last 30 years, and that compiler vendors are not enforcing anyway because they don’t want to annoy their users? Windows’ backward compatibility is a joke compared to Fortran.
  - pklausler 7mo ago
    We're definitely enforcing some of them. But the latest one from F'2023 isn't going to be.
deadbabe 7mo ago
Great, can we see some benchmarks?
- FormerLabFred 7mo ago
  Cobolsky holds the record for most surprised looks per line of code :) Fortransky benchmarks pending the feed scorer will have real numbers worth reporting Whenever time allows in future: Fortran vs Go vs Python
foxglacier 7mo ago
Yea na, Fortran is pretty compiler dependent and there are a lot of compilers. Already old Fortran code used all sorts of now-dead proprietary compilers and can take a huge effort to get it to compile on modern compilers or even modern computers. Modern code might use Gfortran which sometimes makes breaking changes so that's not an option. Perhaps if everyone uses the latest shiny new Flang or whatever, then it'll finally last 50 years? Not likely, given the history.
- pklausler 7mo ago
  For a standardized language, Fortran isn’t very portable across compilers. GNU Fortran has done a great job supporting legacy features, and I hope that our work in flang-new has made it easy to port to, as well. I basically ignored the zealots who wanted flang-new to be a strict compiler by default. The hobbyist project LFortran is quite the opposite, and will yell at you by default for perfectly conforming variations in keyword spelling. For those who like that sort of thing, that’s exactly the sort of thing that they like.

FormerLabFred 7mo ago

You are not the first one to ask :) We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon. Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :) When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc. Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty. Both Cobolsky and Fortransky looks great on Swordfish90’s cool-retro-term, but we are building our own terminal for Fortransky too. There is a blog post with screenshots over at Patreon/formerlab Can’t get enough Fortran

embedding-shape 7mo ago
> The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it If you don't mind me asking, why is the world better with more Fortran-based software?
- FormerLabFred 7mo ago
  Our modern languages are built on it, and it’s incredibly fast, so it deserves to be kept alive. We owe a great deal to the people who wrote it in the 1950s I guess
  - embedding-shape 7mo ago
    > Our modern languages are built on it It's part of the lineage, yeah, probably started with Algol though? Fast I guess is always nice, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep it alive solely for that, at least to me.
    - mathieudombrock 7mo ago
      I think the best answer you're really going to get here is that it's cool and fun to learn and use old languages.
      - embedding-shape 7mo ago