Open Source Learning The Oldest Programming Language (2024)

While I probably should be learning a language like C, Go, or whatever new trendy language the ThePrimeagen mentions on Twitter (OCaml?), I'm going to attempt to learn Fortran[1].

Fortran, which stands for FORmula TRANslator[2], was created at IBM by John Backus in 1957 for scientific applications and has apparently been popular for high-performance computing and benchmarking supercomputers in recent years. Fortran has had several subsequent releases since then; FORTRAN 77, Fortran 90, Fortran 95, Fortran 2003, Fortran 2008, and the latest Fortran 2018.

To understand what version of Fortran to learn/use, we first must understand the difference between fixed form and free form Fortran. The fixed form layout comes from the very beginning of Fortran, inherited from punch cards, and has odd restrictions about the column in which comments and statements are placed. The free form layout, first introduced in Fortran 90, removed special columns and added the ability to write comments wherever, and is what we'll be learning in this article. The compiler we'll be using is GNU Fortran, or gfortran. You can install it via Homebrew (macOS) with the gcc formula, or install it using a package manager for your OS. To tell gfortran that your code uses the free form layout, set the file extension to .f90 or newer. The following comment on the Fortran discussion board explains this well.

The .f90 suffix means that the source code is free format, not thatthe code conforms to the Fortran 90 standard. Code that uses the .f90suffix can use features from any Fortran standard. All Fortrancompilers recognize .f90 as a suffix indicating free source form, butsome may not recognize a suffix such as .f95, .f03, .f08, or .f18.Some users may have build tools that do not recognize suffixes otherthan .f90. Most Fortran source code on GitHub that uses features froma standard more recent than Fortran 90 still uses the .f90 suffix.

Coming from TypeScript, and before that, Python, I'm very used to (and comfortable with) modern — you might say "aesthetic" — syntax . Although I wouldn't say Fortran syntax is quite modern, it seems to avoid the syntactic sugar nightmares that plague beginners in other languages[3]. Take a look at this helloworld.f90 example below.

Older Fortran programs required the use of SCREAMING_CASE for all keywords, but in modern Fortran you can and it is recommended to use snake_case (you can still use SCREAMING_CASE or any other case you want though).

The syntax for

Source: HackerNews