YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Many years of FORTRAN. Followed by many years of Fortran.

Having said that, so many foundational libraries were implemented in Fortran (BLAS, LINPACK/EISPACK, LAPACK, MINPACK, FISHPACK, FFTPACK, etc.) - thanks for that.

It was frustrating that, 30 years after Fortran 77, professors were insisting in writing in that dialect. Thank God I escaped that hell.

Edit: Since people don't understand my point - I'm well aware of the existence of newer Fortran standards. But in much of academia, the professors insisted on sticking with Fortran 77.

Growing up on early micros, with BASIC, my father had Fortran for the TRS-80.

I took a stab at learning it, but the documentation was reference for calling the compiler, not so much learning the language. And when I found a FORTRAN book, it was quite dated and talking about things like tapes and punches and what not.

So, that effort stalled.

But, my first quarter in college, I took a FORTRAN (77) class. FORTRAN taught on the schools CDC Cyber mainframe.

This was quite a change from 8-bit PET BASIC.

But, most importantly, it was exposure to much of the same concept that an 8-bit computer has, but from a different tact.

This gave me more of a way to view things from a higher level, since I had to make them fit the two different views of how FORTRAN looked at things, how the Cyber presented things, and how BASIC and the PET were "same thing only different".

It also gave me access to a multi-user system, and all of the interesting capabilities it offers.

I remember when they put in their first lab of PCs, and how they started teaching folks Turbo Pascal on micro computers, and I just felt that the users were missing out on a bigger world. "Anyone" can access a PC or micro computer at home, but mainframe or multi user mini access, not so much. It's just a much bigger world out there, and we tend to baby duck what we first see.

Different world today, never had to use FORTRAN professionally, but I am most grateful for the experience of learning it and its environment. Very powerful medium for broader learning.

Also FORTRAN was the only notable computer thing I had "taught" to me (outside of my 20 minute introduction to BASIC by my high school teacher), pretty much everything else I self learned from books and such, even knowing the bulk of it before taking classes in school.

It was a very bare-bones language, felt more like a high-level assembly macro language. One thing it did well was expressing formulas with the usual "mathematical" notations (+,-,*,/, parentheses to group operations, variables). I guess this was revolutionary at the time. But the control structures were very limited, everything was basically jumps and gotos. The IF was merely a syntactic sugar for conditional jumps. Of course, functions did not exist in the language.

[1] https://mveg.es/posts/fizzbuzz-in-fortran-1/

After learning Pascal I thought fortran was definitely strange and moved on, never to touch it again

My first project there was removing all of the Hollerith from the code. Since Fortran predated strings, you had to manipulate them as integers. When you tied that to the original Fortran dynamic memory system, Dynosour, which used equivalenced arrays as pointers, it was a disaster.

It also gave me an appreciation for JavaBeanFactoryFactory. The original Fortran limited identifiers to six characters, the first of which indicated whether the variable was an integer, logical (bool), or real (float). I will take a 100 character name over ILBNK1 every single time.

GOTOs were surprisingly not a big problem, but structured code is definitely a bit easier to read, especially since it brought the practice of indentation with it.

Overall, it was a great experience but I wouldn't want to do it again, even if the work was interesting.

the real test will be on the longevity side.

My implementation was based on David Rogers' "Procedural Elements for Computer Graphics", one of only two texts available on 3D graphics, the other being Foley and VanDam.

I remember managing my own stack in a language which didn't support recursion. I learned a lot. Good times.

[0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/8-summer-at-xerox-in-24-bit-col...

I really enjoy CHM's oral histories. I'm slowly working my way thru all of them and there are some real gems in there (Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Margaret Hamilton, Gordon Moore, Fred Brooks, John Warnock, etc).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDsWTyLEgbk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus

Saddest case was a PhD student in chemical engineering near the end of his thesis work struggling to get reproducible results. After half an hour of debug I realised he was using un-initialised Fortran array state for his data. I suspect his discovery went up in smoke.

Everyone who has used it also has horror stories though. It is a very old language and sometimes artifacts pop up. One time I was parallelizing some older code and ran into an infuriating bug where it seemed like some boundary conditions just weren't being passed properly. There were no compiler errors or warnings. Some MPI commands were simply being ignored, but not others. It turned out that the jank-ass compiler I was using for the project had decided to go into Fortran-77 mode (without saying anything) and stripped them out in the precompiling stage (without saying anything) if they were longer than the 72 character limit that Fortran-77 had. I was coding on a computer new enough to have no CD or DVD drive, but was running into the character limit of a 60's punch card system without knowing it!

PS: The book creates a tsunami calculator and evolves it by adding Modern Fortran features chapter by chapter.

Bill Sky the Fortran guy on Youtube is another very elementary but excellent presentation.

There is an increasing amount of material out there and the people on Fortran Discourse are very knowledgeable and helpful.

https://numpy.org/doc/1.19/user/building.html

I often consider getting back into programming and a few years ago, when I rejoined USENET and started looking around, the Fortran newsgroup `comp.lang.fortran` was active. The community there was as welcoming and supportive as I've met, and I got some interesting info.

I knew FORTRAN 77 and looked at some FORTRAN IV code. Now it's a very different language indeed -- I can't read the modern version at all, it's totally unfamiliar -- but you can still write old-style code in the new language, or mix in some new features in older-style code. It looks pretty good, TBH.

It was one of the last courses, and we were discussing optimization techniques for matrix multiplication. There were the usual three nested loops and the instructor started talking about memory access patterns and stride through the arrays. He re-nested the loops, showed the improvement in access patterns, and pointed out that the compiler itself could do that automatically. (Not to mention vectorize, etc.)

This was around mid-90's, and it gave me a strong appreciation for the fact that simpler languages can be easier to reason about, transform, and optimize. If I'd spent most of the class wondering why the language was as limited as it was, that one session gave a good explanation why it could be viewed as a strength.

Parallel to all of this, I worked a few summers for a major electric utility company. They had a cluster of Cyber mainframes (Descendents of the CDC 6600) that they used to run the grid in real time. Everything was in Fortran (77?), and the shop had a number of people well versed in the language. I didn't a whole lot of direct experience, but it was interesting to see. One thing I do remember is that the memory/disk layout of the data structures were fixed at build time. They ran quarterly builds to update the layouts to add fields, etc. and made do in the interim. Between the constraints of the language, the hardware limitations, and the need for hard real time requirements, there wasn't a lot of room for flexibility.

Here is something that started as a specification of the input format of one particular program-tool. That input format was then cloned and mutated by dozens of me-too program-tools. Eventually that format was able to support an interpretation as a language with its own language-like abstractions. That is astonishing and I think was not on the radar of computing machinery people in the 50s.

  INTEGER ARR1(10), ARR2(5)
  EQUIVALENCE (ARR1(6), ARR2)
  ARR2(1) = 10

On DEC VAX, it compiled for one assembler instuction per operator