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

> 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

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.

> 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.

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.

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!

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

> 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.

Fortran will survive the cockroaches even, when the world 404s

Your code will work unchanged until you try to change compilers or your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language.

> 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.

We're definitely enforcing some of them. But the latest one from F'2023 isn't going to be.

Great, can we see some benchmarks?

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

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.

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.

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

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