Back to the Fortran Future 2
This satellite event takes place 8th September 2025 adjacent to RSECon25 (9-11th September 2025) at the University of Warwick.
Its free to attend, so if you have an interest in Scientific Fortran please consider joining us.
FORTRAN IV Manual (1982), adapted by Rafko Adrinek and published by Iskra Delta! 
#FORTRAN was the first widely adopted “standard” programming language, especially popular during the 1960s and 70s — the punch card era. 
Back then, it powered massive mainframes, and its legacy still lives on today in modern supercomputer programming! 
I love this piece about #lowlevel #programming (which includes a shameless plug for #fortran, something i had not realized before)
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out"
@mattgemmell Surely you mean 64x16.
Yes, that is Fortran. On the Radio Shack TRS-80. My first programming job.
Porting COBOL Code and the Trouble With Ditching Domain Specific Languages - Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in ... - https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/porting-cobol-code-and-the-trouble-with-ditching-domain-specific-languages/ #softwaredevelopment #featured #interest #gnucobol #fortran #cobol
I would be a greybeard #UNIX guy if I could grow a non-scraggley beard, and it's unfair to the #DOGE teens to claim that the IRS and Social Security rely on ancient #COBOL code that only a few people alive actually understand. They also rely on ancient #FORTRAN code and even I never studied that at Computer Camp.
Pondering if I dare to put #Fortran into my CV. 
I can do some Fortran, partly because it keeps coming up in all sorts of #retrocomputing contexts, but, even with Ratfor enhancements, I don't consider it a well-designed or pleasant language, and I'm not sure I can see myself working at a place that deals in new Fortran code now that nice, human-friendly languages such as NumPy and APL have been invented. Besides, 21st century Fortran is a really weird language that doesn't even know what it wants to be when it grows up.
The original #LISP had 7 primitives: \(\texttt{cons}\), \(\texttt{car,}\) \(\texttt{cdr}\), \(\texttt{atom}\), \(\texttt{quote}\), \(\texttt{eq}\), and \(\texttt{cond}\). And the original #Smalltalk syntax could fit on a 5×7 card. That meant a novice could learn the syntax in a matter of minutes, and direct all his efforts to learning how properly to wield the power of that Turing-complete language. This was why, in the 1970s and the 1980s, many college freshmen were taught FP in Scheme (a more modern LISP) and many middle school children were taught OO in Smalltalk. These were surely the best "first" #programming languages.
#FORTRAN and #BASIC were simple, too. FORTRAN, the first high-level language, has been in continuous use since the late 1950s by engineers, who are not keyboard warriors. BASIC was invented in the early 1960s for teaching programming to non-STEM students at Dartmouth. It sired a whole generation of self-taught children in the 1980s.
Compare those to C++, Erlang, Python, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Scala, Rust, Kotlin, and pretty much every language in popular use today. Most consider Python and JavaScript to be the simplest of modern languages. Yet, they are massive, complex languages. No 10-year-old could teach himself those, nor should he.
The original versions of those classic languages cannot be used to solve modern problems. But they should still be taught to youngsters as their first language. Throwing in the kids' faces a modern enterprise language confuses them and discourages them. Consequently, many novices never attain that state of flow, when the joy of programming gushes forth.
#Simplicity is a virtue.
I don’t suppose there are Fortran bindings for Godot right?
We wouldn't have this problem with DOGE's interns if they had to learn COBOL, FORTRAN, and PASCAL - like I had to.
BTW: My major programming language? Perl
Second only to Objective-C... NOT SWIFT. Obj-C!
I taught classes and would occasionally get folks who worked at the big labs, I had a student who had been at CERN (the birthplace of WWW) and she had punchcards with CERN logo printed on them.
I asked her to send me some as a souvenir, but it never happened. 
For some reason, the memory of my box of fortran punch cards suspended in mid-air as I attempted, unsuccessfully, to move it from the bookshelf to my desk back in 1975 before they disintermediated themselves all over the floor, desk, file cabinet, and a few even found their way into the garbage can. What a mess.
* I was able to re-assemble them, Assembler doesn't work for this purpose fwiw, and complete the project with a passing grade! It was only pass/fail. No need to drop the class!
#Fortran
For a periods in the late 80s, early 90s, late 90s, and early 2000s, I was a professional #Astronomer (yet another workstation jockey) with a particular interest in #BioAstronomy -- planets, star forming, potential habitats -- that sort of thing.
Used data-reduction software. And I wrote some in #FORTRAN
Along the way, also learned BASIC, C, C++, Pascal, and then #Python
Helped develop the #NICMOS camera for Hubble. Then got to reduce some data from it to study protostars.
[2/3]
#lispyGopherClimate #podcast #archive https://archives.anonradio.net/202501150000_screwtape.mp3 0UTC Wed
#interview ing @shizamura author of the popular #scifi https://sarilho.net/en/ #comic
#climateCrisis #haiku by @kentpitman
#liveChat in #lambdaMOO as always
telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888
co guest
@join screwtape
#Questions for @shizamura please!
#lisp, #fortran, #grammars, oh my.
#Murderbots #bookstodon @nosrednayduj @dougmerritt @ratxue @mdhughes I finally read 90% of it (no spoilers please)
Young whippersnappers who grew up with #CloudComputing and #OpenSource software might enjoy this account of pre-#computer computations; “Chemical Eye on a Translating Father” https://www.latimes.com/socal/la-canada-valley-sun/news/tn-vsl-xpm-2007-03-29-lco-macdougall329-story.html
So my question is, what's an intuitive way to use dropping-in- #fortran from the #lisp #repl ?
Reading a .f file ~ into a let* form which I'm currently doing seems kind of bland. #f( this(1) = is(2) + a / fortran * line) seems kind of uninspiring (who would want to express themselves like this). Maybe Enter "fortran mode" and read lines of fortran from *standard-input* with normal interactive evaluation hacked in?
The fortran becomes #series expressions in lisp.
Just for the people *not* mutual on #izzzzi with me, in my #lisp #series quest I wrote a converter for published #fortran like https://web.archive.org/web/20081220142747/http://cnx.org/content/m17626/latest/ into #lisp s-expressions.
> (f2lisps "wfta3.f.txt")
(((C31 -0.8660254) (C32 -1.5)))
((R2 (* (A (+ (2) (- A)) (3)) C31)) (R1 (+ A2 A3)) (A1 (+ A1 R1))
(R1 (+ A1 (* R1 C32))) (S2 (* (B (+ (2) (- B)) (3)) C31)) (S1 (+ B2 B3))
(B1 (+ B1 S1)) (S1 (+ B1 (* S1 C32))) (A2 (+ R1 (- S2))) (A3 (+ R1 S2))
(B2 (+ S1 R2)) (B3 (+ S1 (- R2))))
inb4 wrong
@mdhughes @amoroso This is the heart of the whole Lisp1/Lisp2 argument.
I am of the Orthodox persuasion: in #Lisp, a function is a first class object, so there should be no difference between a function and a value, so if a value is in a function position it should be treated as a function (i.e. applied with the CDR of the expression as its arg list).
The Catholics, of course, differ; but they're little more than heathens and doctrinally closer to #Fortran.
Fun observation: the quote "I don’t know what the programming language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called FORTRAN.” was said closer to the year 2000 than the last 2 revisions to the #Fortran Spec (F18 in 2019, F23 in 2024).
Quote from 1982 by Charles Anthony Richard Hoarce
Luana
