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Comment by FormerLabFred | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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?

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

> 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.

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.

I'd agree with all of those reasons! I do so myself as well, was just specifically curious about the "The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it" part. Don't get me wrong, I've spent too many nights learning "dead" languages too, but never with the idea that the world would be better if I published more code in these dead languages, it's just for my own gratification and learnings.

This thread makes me happy

I know right! I was pleasantly surprised. It has to be one of the greatest news I have heard in a while.

I came here to suggest COBOL as a better fit, then saw your comment a few levels up in this thread.

Out of curiosity, does your implementation use CODASYL?

(For people that don't pay much attention to historical software systems, most CODASYL implementations were similar to JSON document databases, so going that way isn't as crazy as it sounds.)

Great comment! Thanks!

No CODASYL, the JSON parser is hand-rolled Fortran with a depth-tracking key scanner

CODASYL not a crazy direction for the feed composer

Got more depth to explore here, still early :)

CODASYL is deeply integrated with COBOL; I'm not sure it ever even worked with fortran. (I was asking about the new COBOL version you mentioned.)

How do COBOL and Fortran compare for something like this ?

COBOL is more painful, Fortran better.

Good you raised the topic, can write a blog post on it when we ship Cobolsky. Will be a proof of concept repo. Fortransky is the one

(If AT Proto did fixed-width records instead of JSON, COBOL would be formidable)

Which version of the language is it? It looks like you used Fortran90 at least (modules are used), which is pretty old, but not totally ancient like Fortran77.

Anyway there are also 2018 and 2023 versions…

I still make a living from Fortran77 work, though much of it is converting it to Matlab.

Building interfaces or full converting? Either way sounds like a dream job, haha.

Ya know what? Rock on Fortran Friend. Keep doing what you are doing. We need more nerds passionate about Fortran.

Thank you for choosing Fortran. Seriously, I mean it.

Someone else already said this, but it is awesome because it proves that you can write useful software using languages others consider ancient or dead and therefore "unusable".

Keep up the great work!

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