A Forlorn Hope of Fortran Modernisation · Amen Zwa, Esq.

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Amen Zwa, Esq.

A Forlorn Hope of Fortran Modernisation

a proposal for a dependently typed Fortran

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For decades, people in IT had taken delight in drafting Fortran’s obituary. Yet, this old language lives on. But in recent years, the Fortran user community has begun sounding alarms: Fortran shops are having difficulty finding young programmers to replace those who are leaving the workforce, because the young are not willing to devote their careers to this archaic language. At present, no language can rival, let alone surpass, Fortran when it comes to implementing long-lived, large-scale, massively-parallel scientific and engineering applications; not even C and C++. Yet, modern programmers know nothing about Fortran, nor have they any interest in it. Suffice it to say, Fortran has an image problem.

In this article, I explore the causes of Fortran’s diminished popularity and discuss potential remedies. The key points I make here are these:

Fortran is indispensable for scientific parallel computing

The industry is facing a shortage of Fortran programmers

The industry has no actionable plans to replenish the ranks

My intended audience include the following groups:

Computer scientists maintaining the Fortran language standard

Scientists and engineers who implement scientific software using Fortran

STEMers interested in parallel processing and scientific programming

Given the breadth and depth of topics involved, the reader is expected to be an experienced parallel programmer in both procedural and functional languages and possess a working knowledge of simple type theory, parametric type theory, and dependent type theory.

It would seem that trying to shore up this mid-century language for the grind of the 21st Century verges on insanity. Not so. I contend that Fortran modernisation is worthwhile and necessary. I admit, though, that refreshing Fortran for the 2020s is but a forlorn hope, at present.

Before we delve into the subject, here is some background on my connection to Fortran. Like other electrical engineering undergraduates in the early 1980s, I learned FORTRAN in college. I used FORTRAN 1977 on the DEC VAX-11/780. FORTRAN was then the primary language for performing electronic circuit simulation, digital signal processing (DSP), finite element method (FEM), computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and other engineering computations, so we were required to learn the language.

But in those days, most of us STEMers tried to learn every programming language we could get our hands on. There were only a few languages in popular use in science and engineering: LISP, FORTRAN, C, Pascal, ML, and Prolog; good compilers for these languages were available only on minicomputers; and the only place where we could gain access to these large, expensive machines was at the university computer centre. Scarcity creates demand, I suppose. I did most of my work in my preferred languages: LISP, C, and ML. So, my FORTRAN experience was limited to class assignments.

Later, in computer science graduate school, my research work led me back to Fortran 90 on a CRAY Y-MP with an attached T3D. My professional association with Fortran ended, when I left academia for industry in the mid 1990s. Even in those days, no one in IT was using Fortran any longer. But out of personal interest, I kept up with Fortran’s evolution, through the years. So, my views presented here are born of dated hands-on experience with older FORTRAN, present awareness of modern Fortran’s predicament, and decades-long hands-on experience with numerous programming languages, both modern and ancient. And I admit that although I am no fan of Fortran at a practical level, I truly admire Fortran at an intellectual level, for its originality, longevity, and history.

Now, let us crack on.

yesterday

The concept of modern computer was conceived in the minds of mathematicians in the late 1930s. Then, in the mid 1940s, the implementation of modern computer was realised in the hands of electrical engineers. Initially, programming was done by wiring up the circuits. This was followed by entering binary words into registers using hardware switches. Later, symbolic assembly languages were invented. And in 1957, Backus, a computer scientist extraordinaire, and his colleagues at IBM created the world’s first high-level programming language, FORTRAN. Its purpose was to enable scientists to implement scientific applications using their native tongue, the mathematical notation, instead of in a foreign tongue, the assembly language.

Over the past 70 years, Fortran continued to evolve, incorporating the advances through the decades. There have been numerous standardised versions of Fortran: 1966, 1977, 1990, 1995, 2003, 2008, 2018, and 2023. The latest standard version as of this writing in early 2024, the Fortran 2023 (draft), is a...