To reflect the significance in advancements/differences, I propose the following 
:
Pre-F66 = Precambrian
F66-F77 = Palaeozoic
F90-95 = Mesozoic
2003 and later = Cenozoic
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Ah, but most of the popular FORTRAN codes are actually from the Cretaceous.
Not anecdote, but I asked Chat GPT to make me angry about Fortran, and this is what I got. I cannot help but agree with some of the sentiment. Ever from the “angriest tier”, the line about “each code being morally suspect ring true” – I recently worked on code from 80’s used by my group to model solar flares, and after compiling and running with checks enabled, turns out it was using array elements out of bounds on a regular basis. Because using a parameter to encode an array size would be too difficult – better to write it as a magic number everywhere, only to have someone else change it 10 years later only in half of the places…
Nevertheless, still enjoying that I at least still have a chance to work with Fortran code anywhere!
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I think it would be interesting if the mascot character of Fortran evolves gradually from dinosaur to mammals (?) to alien (??) as the version number is increased…
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Nice use of AI. Not exactly wrong, but not right either.
I recently dealt with the same issue while helping someone else debug their code. Seems like common sense, but I guess it’s not so common.
Fortran is a scientific cult, not a language. Its devotees worship speed and arrays over clarity, correctness, or maintainability. Using Fortran today is less about solving problems and more about proving allegiance to a 50-year-old mindset. The language has become a status symbol, not a tool.
lol this made me chuckle
A FORTRAN 77 compiler has been added to the Desktop Development Environment for RISC OS:
Fortran compiler optimised to producing efficient Arm code
- based on the same core technology as the C compiler, above
- implements standard ANSI X3.9-1978, also known as Fortran 77
- can also optionally follow the earlier Fortran 66 where different
- includes a pre-processor stage in addition to the standard
- complete with SWI calling functions to interface with RISC OS
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There is also a dedicated page about FORTRAN:
https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2025/11/20/episode-iv-a-new-hope
In the film Zootopia 2 from 2025, the IT character Paul Moldebrant has a “Fortran is my native tongue” sticker on his computer.
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Someone wrote in a recent thread, “I am playing with lFortran (ver 0.60) on an android phone within termux.” My family is from India and I will share a story. In the 1960s an aunt was working on a PhD in physics in an Indian university (a woman going to college, much less graduate school, was unusual then in India). She needed a FORTRAN program to perform some calculations, and her university did not have a computer she could use, so she would send letters to my father (a physics PhD) with FORTRAN code, which he would have punched into cards, and after running the code on the batch system at his institution, he would mail her the results. She got her doctorate. We have come a long way in 60 years! I could never interest my father in Fortran 90 or later versions. He referred to his FORTRAN as “classic Fortran”. In 2009 (!) the 2nd edition of Classical Fortran: Programming for Engineering and Scientific Applications was written by an author with the same view.
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My PhD thesis was submitted in 1963 and the degree was awarded in 1964 in a university that had a computer which I had never used. I may be one of the last successful candidates in applied mathematics who could say that. Later in 1963 I started using FORTRAN II in another university.
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Chris Sims, who shared the 2011 Nobel prize in economics, just passed away. He programmed in (at least) Fortran and Matlab.
Bayesian Hill-Climbing Software
Old FORTRAN code for minimizing a function whose evaluation is expensive. At each iteration, a Bayesian posterior mean for the surface shape conditional on points already sampled is constructed and the minimum of this is found. This minimum is then used as a trial point for a new function evaluation. A version of the program exists that takes account of the fact that the expected improvement is raised at points far from points already sampled, by the fact that there is high uncertainty in such regions. There seems to be no particular performance advantage for this program over, say, quasi-newton with BFGS update. But one gets an estimate at every function evaluation of the shape of the function, which may be useful.
He also wrote BAYESMTH: A Program for Multivariate Bayesian Interpolation in Fortran.
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I don’t know if it has been posted here before (I could not find it) but I am listening to the book “The Three Body Problem” and came across this section of the book:
made me laugh, since at the time I was listening to the book I was also writing code in Fortran
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“An Engineer Looks at Electronic Computing” – 1965 IBM 1130 Computing System Promo Film
The discussion of Fortran starts at 11:00
A former colleague, still with Intel, sent around the following interesting bit:
The Intel Fortran team was curious if the Intel® Fortran Compiler was an enabling technology for the Artemis moon mission completed a few weeks ago. I contacted some folks I know at NASA and confirmed that Intel Fortran was used to build their workhorse fluid dynamics solvers OVERFLOW and FUN3D that were used to define the aerodynamic environments of both the SLS rocket and the Orion crew capsule.
Steve
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[shameless plug] The trajectories that were flown by Orion in the Artemis I and Artemis II missions were designed with code compiled by the Intel Fortran compiler (originally CVF, then ifort, now ifx).
References
- J. Williams, J. S. Senent, R. Mathur, S. M. Stewart, “A History of Copernicus: The Origin, Development, and Evolution of JSC’s Spacecraft Trajectory Design and Optimization System”, AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference, August 2025, AAS 25-576.
- J. Williams, T. F. Dawn, A. L. Batcha, “A History of Orion Mission Design, Copernicus Development, and the Artemis I Trajectory”, AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference, August 2023, AAS 23-241.
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VIntage Fortran (VIF) is [Marcel van der Veer’s] experimental compiler for vintage Fortran, that is, Fortran 66-77. VIF is experimental in the sense that it does not emulate the archaic Fortran machine model, and therefore cannot compile a few rarely used, obsolete statements. This is a trade-off between completeness and efficiency.
Another experimental feature are multiple precision data types
REAL*32andCOMPLEX*64. This should suffice for most multi-precision applications, typically requiring twenty up to sixty digits. VIF is probably the only vintage Fortran implementation offering these types.
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The README of this project is funny.
I have come across a PDF of the Fortran coloring book, is this something that would be ok to share here? Or are there any permissions I should ask ahead of time?