I have just discovered the new French FORTRAN thematic network:
https://www.fortran.cnrs.fr/
But it means FORêts en TRANsformation = TRANsforming FORests (due to anthropic pressure) in English 
. I guess some people there are working on models…
So I guess its true that some folks can’t see the FORTRAN for the trees 
2 Likes
People thought some years ago they could build
fortresses using PL-I,Ada, … but, as with
the broken pine trees in the FORêts pictures, those
fortresses have collapsed and blown away, but Fortran
is still here to stay.
A oak language!
Hum… There was an Oak (programming language) - Wikipedia which was a part of a Green platform, but:
Oak was renamed Java in 1994 after a trademark search revealed that Oak was used by Oak Technology.[2] Java 1.0 was finally shipped in 1996.[3]
Fortran codes related to forests, from the Earth Science section of my list:
SPARTACUS-Surface - Canopy radiation scheme: computes radiative transfer in complex 3D surface canopies, such as forests and cities, by Robin Hogan and VakankGrang. It makes use of the “SPARTACUS” technique, originally developed for clouds.
Biome Ecological strategy simulator (BiomeESS): model in which vegetation is represented as plant functional types sampled from high dimensional spaces of combined plant traits that can consistently coexist in plant individuals. Reference: Weng, E., Dybzinski, R., Farrior, C. E., and Pacala, S. W.: “Competition alters predicted forest carbon cycle responses to nitrogen availability and elevated CO2: simulations using an explicitly competitive, game-theoretic vegetation demographic model”, Biogeosciences, 16, 4577–4599, BG - Competition alters predicted forest carbon cycle responses to nitrogen availability and elevated CO2: simulations using an explicitly competitive, game-theoretic vegetation demographic model, 2019.
ForestVegetationSimulator (FVS): family of individual-tree, distance-independent, forest growth simulation models, from the USDA Forest Service. It can simulate a wide range of silvicultural treatments for most major forest tree species, forest types, and stand conditions.
Flexible Snow Model (FSM2): multi-physics energy balance model of snow accumulation and melt, extending the Factorial Snow Model with additional physics, driving and output options. An associated preprint is A Flexible Snow Model (FSM 2.1.0) including a forest canopy, by Richard Essery et al., EGUsphere (2024).
LPJ-LMfire Dynamic Global Vegetation Model: code associated with paper Increased fire activity under high atmospheric oxygen concentrations is compatible with the presence of forests, by Rayanne Vitali et al., Nature Communications (2022).
MANDIFORE_modeling: Forestry x climate scenarios for NSF-funded MANDIFORE project, by Christy Rollinson and Lucien Fitzpatrick
Trees: pre-processing tool used to virtually build the forest fuel arrays used by FIRETEC and
QUIC-Fire, by Alexander Josephson and joliveto1
VolumeLibrary: National Volume Estimator Library (NVEL) is a collection of the standing tree volume estimators used by the U.S. Forest Service
1 Like
I enjoyed Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) by James Gleick. Here is an excerpt from pp173-174, about Mitchell Feigenbaum’s discovery of his constant in Los Alamos in 1975.
Feigenbaum had played with numbers all his life. When he was a teen-ager he knew how to calculate logarithms and sines that most people would look up in tables. But he had never learned to use any computer bigger than his hand calculator – and in this he was typical of physicists and mathematicians, who tended to disdain the mechanistic thinking that computer work implied. Now, though, it was time. He asked a colleague to teach him Fortran, and by the end of the day, for a variety of functions, he had calculated his constant to five decimal places, 4.66920. That night he read about double precision in the manual, and the next day he got as far as 4.6692016090 – enough precision to convince Stein. Feigenbaum wasn’t quite sure he had convinced himself, though. He had set out to look for regularity – that was what understanding mathematics meant – but he had also set out knowing that particular kinds of equations, just like particular physical systems, behave in special, characteristic ways. These equations were simple, after all. Feigenbaum understood the quadratic equation, he understood the sine equation – the mathematics was trivial. Yet something in the heart of these very different equations, repeating over and over again, created a single number. He had stumbled upon something: perhaps just a curiousity; perhaps a new law of nature.
The FORTRAN Feigenbaum used was a limited language but small enough that he could learn it in a few hours and get results. Gleick’s book discusses many examples of numerical experiments that advanced the science of dynamical systems, such as the Lorenz system. I wonder what books people suggest reading after Gleick’s, especially ones that cover numerical experiments. There is “Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos” by Strogatz and “Dynamical Systems with Applications Using Python” by Lynch.
3 Likes
If you want to dig in the archives of the BYTE magazine, this is an original search interface:
The date of that BYTE vol. 17 no. 12 is November 1992.
Same no., page 299, an article about the young (1989) BASH, the Bourne-Again shell.
Note that you can move smoothly into that interface using the arrow keys.
1 Like
“Linus Torvalds of Finland” sounds like it is missing a prepended “Lord” or some title. 
3 Likes
In England, they have Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Linus has Finnish and American nationalities, but not English. There will be no Sir Torvalds…
For a history of Fortran compilers on Linux one can look at Jeff Templon’s page.
1 Like
The RetroMagazine World is a freely downloadable magazine under license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The website is in Italian but the magazine is also available in English.
In Issues 23 & 24, there are two articles about the Abacus Fortran-64 compiler (1988) for the Commodore 64 machine.
2 Likes
A new video about Fortran has just been released
3 Likes
Since we program in Modern Fortran and communicate in Modern English, we should start referring to pre-FORTRAN 77 as Old FORTRAN, to FORTRAN 77 as Middle FORTRAN, and to Fortran 90 as Early Modern Fortran or Shakespeare’s Fortran.
2 Likes
I have been known to refer to pre-Fortran90 as Jurassic Fortran 
1 Like
That is why it is UPPERCASE, symbolizing thick strong bones 
…
1 Like
Strong bones to fight gravity, which had not yet been discovered since there was no convenient apple tree in the vicinity.
1 Like
So f90 = Cretaceous, f95 = Paleocene, f2003 = Eocene, f2008 = Oligiocene, f2018 = Miocene,
f2023 = Pliocene, f202Y = Pleistocene, and we still have a while to wait for the Recent version.
1 Like