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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

I would expect that most HPC programmers can learn Fortran or Cobol in a week or two. They are reasonably small languages, and Fortran would be sufficiently familiar to people who have both C/C++ with Matlab/Julia experience (typical for HPC). Would it be more proper to say it is not a skill gap, rather a "desire to work with old codebases" gap.

Which the article does admit:

> The skills issue with Fortran is apparently not just about learning Fortran, but more about being associated with Fortran and all of the legacy baggage that has given its vintage and its low marketability going forward.

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I learned Fortran back in 2016 for a HPC course. It was indeed quick to learn but the resources online at the time for understanding compiler and runtime errors were scant compared to more popular languages. I mostly referenced pdfs of old books, and course notes scattered across various academic pages of ~vintage for learning the language and had sparse SO answers for help with gfc errors.

This quote from the article rings true to me:

>First, the lack of a standard library, a common resource in modern programming languages, makes mundane general-purpose programming tasks difficult. Second, building and distributing Fortran software has been relatively difficult, especially for newcomers to the language. Third, Fortran does not have a community maintained compiler like Python, Rust or Julia has, that can be used for prototyping new features and is used by the community as a basis for writing tools related to the language. Finally, Fortran has not had a prominent dedicated website – an essential element for new users to discover Fortran, learn about it, and get help from other Fortran programmers.

The folks behind https://fortran-lang.org have been working on many of these issues.

I wonder what the driver was? Anyway, first release of Fortran Package Manager was in November 2020: https://github.com/fortran-lang/fpm/releases/tag/v0.1.0 - more recently than I expected.

It was, and AFAIU still is, a grassroots effort started by people who liked Fortran as a language, but decided that the state of package management and availability of "standard" libraries was behind other languages, and decided to do something about other than whining in discussion forums. And that lack of an attractive website introducing the language to newcomers and pointing to the new tools like package managers and package repositories was a barrier to entry, hence the creation of the https://fortran-lang.org/en/ website.

> low marketability going forward.

I'm not so sure that will continue to be the case. Fortran has moved up substantially in TIOBE (to #20), so there's clearly growing interest.

True, but for FORTRAN maybe a month.

FORTRAN IV/77 has some statements that IIRC correctly have or will be removed from the newer fortran and that I think no other language has. Things like computational gotos, and a few others I have forgotten. Those could cause a bit of confusion with people looking at this old code on HPC.

Unlike COBOL, at least moving from FORTRAN you will not need to deal with rounding issues on floats.

"FORTRAN IV/77 has some statements that IIRC correctly have or will be removed from the newer fortran"

Right, importantly GOTO. The question I've puzzled over for some while is how much legacy (unmodified) FORTRAN IV/77 applications/libraries still exist and are in regular use—and whether porting this old code to later Fortran or other languages remains a significant problem.

My interest stems from the fact my first language was FORTRAN IV.

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