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.)