I'm holding out hope for a Fortran resurgence.
It's a tiny hope. But a hope nonetheless. Fortran is fun.
It's a tiny hope. But a hope nonetheless. Fortran is fun.
Also, do you prefer a specific version of Fortran, or is the latest one fine?
You can read more about the language and its high-level features here: https://fortran-lang.org
That website/community was created in part by the original author of the Python Sympy library, Ondřej Čertík. He is also working on his own Fortran compiler that you can use via webassembly to play around with Fortran; find links if you want to play here: https://lfortran.org
I've only dabbled a little, but I like the general idea, and I appreciate a F/OSS Fortran compiler being developed like this alongside actively seeking to grow the Fortran community & push the language & its libraries forward.
I expect more widespread adoption of Fortran to be quite a ways out, but what Ondřej is doing for Fortran is necessary (not sufficient) for such adoption to be the case.
[1] Is Fortran easier to optimize than C for heavy calculations?
Fortran has also added support for e.g. object-oriented programming, pure functions (no side effects for better optimization), and pointers. So idiomatic modern Fortran code looks very different from the “Fortran 77” code that many people might think of when they hear the name :).