I would like to present Fortran-Lang and its community projects at deRSE23, the Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany. See this pull request:
As in the past, I’d like to invite anybody to join as co-author if you’d like to provide ideas, content, or other feedback. Otherwise, I will explicitly acknowledge contributors to the Fortran-lang community projects.
As it stands currently, the abstract exceeds the max 750 character limit, so I need to condense it even further. It is more or less derived from two previous Fortran-lang works:
The deadline for abstract submission is tomorrow, November 21. I plan to merge and submit the abstract tomorrow evening, leaving about 28 hours for contributions. (I apologize for the short notice, it’s been a busy week…)
If you’d like to participate or suggests edits to the current abstract, please comment in the pull request.
I just wanted to add that for now it suffices to approve the abstract. If accepted (notifications will be issued on Dec 22), I will create a draft of the slides and solicit reviews and feedback. In that case your help will be needed again in late January/early February.
Thanks to everyone who has commented so far. I’m very happy with the current abstract. Thank you also for all the likes which have earned me a nice topic badge!
The deadline for submissions has been extended, so I will leave the pull request open for another day or two, just in case anyone joins the party late.
Timeline
October 10, 2022 - We are open for submissions
November 21, 2022 EXTENDED: 30.11.22 AoE - Deadline for submissions
December 12, 2022 - Open registration for conference
December 22, 2022 - Notification of acceptance and program
I asked GPT to build an agenda for the talk. With the abstract and the topics associated by the committee as input, GPT build this agenda:
Agenda
Introduction to Fortran and its importance in science and engineering:
Brief overview of Fortran as a programming language and its history
The role of Fortran in scientific and engineering fields, including its use in high-performance computing and numerical analysis
The challenges of attracting and retaining users in the Fortran community:
The need for a strong and active community to support the continued success and evolution of a programming language
The challenges facing Fortran in terms of attracting new users and retaining existing ones
The formation of Fortran-lang in 2019:
The reasons for forming a dedicated open-source community for Fortran
The goals and objectives of Fortran-lang
The key initiatives of Fortran-lang:
The Fortran package manager: a tool for managing Fortran dependencies and enabling easy reuse of code
The standard library: a collection of commonly used routines and functions for Fortran
The website: a central hub for information and resources related to Fortran, including documentation and tutorials
The LFortran compiler: a modern Fortran compiler that is easy to install and use, and supports the latest language standards.
How Fortran-lang aims to provide a central hub for Fortran users:
The importance of having a central location for information and resources related to Fortran
The role of Fortran-lang in bringing together users, developers, and resources to support the Fortran community
The focus on best practices in software development to simplify the language learning process:
The use of agile development techniques to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Fortran-lang initiatives
The adoption of pragmatic guidelines for reproducibility to support the reliability and credibility of Fortran code
The role of Fortran-lang in promoting Fortran adoption:
The efforts of Fortran-lang to raise awareness of Fortran and its capabilities
The support provided by Fortran-lang to users and developers, including through the package manager, standard library, website, and LFortran compiler
Conclusion and future outlook for the Fortran community and Fortran-lang:
The successes and achievements of Fortran-lang so far
The ongoing challenges and opportunities for Fortran and Fortran-lang
The potential future developments and growth of the Fortran community and Fortran-lang.
It looks like a solid agenda to me. We have to adapt some topics, but all in all, I don’t think I would’ve come up with a better agenda.
Additionally I asked for an interesting introduction to catch attention:
GPT's answer
One way to get the audience’s attention at the beginning of the talk is to start with an interesting or surprising fact or statistic related to Fortran or the Fortran community. For example, you could start by mentioning the number of users or organizations that rely on Fortran, or the amount of research or development that has been supported by Fortran. Another approach could be to present a real-world problem or challenge that can be solved using Fortran, and then explain how Fortran-lang is helping to support the use of Fortran in solving that problem. Alternatively, you could begin by highlighting a recent breakthrough or innovation that was made possible by Fortran, and then discuss how Fortran-lang is helping to drive continued innovation in the language.
The last suggestion sounds promising, but I’m not aware of any breakthroughs or innovations using Fortran.
Finally I asked for titles (I know we already have a title, this was just4fun):
Title suggestions
“Building a Strong and Thriving Community for the Success of Fortran”
“Supporting the Evolution and Adoption of Fortran”
“Strengthening the Fortran Community through Collaboration and Innovation”
“Empowering Fortran Users with a Central Hub and Best Practices”
“Promoting the Continued Relevance and Usefulness of Fortran”
“Fortran: A Language for the Future, Powered by a Vibrant Community”
“Fortran: From the Past to the Present, and Beyond”
“Fortran: A Legacy Language with a Bright Future”
“Fortran: A Language for Scientists and Engineers, Supported by a Thriving Community”
“Fortran: Connecting the Past, Present, and Future through a Vibrant Community”
I must admit that my first reaction when I discovered your post was to think you were joking… It took me some time to understand it was real.
It seems we are in the same situation as in the 17th century when Pascal (1623-1662) and Leibniz built the first arithmetic machines. Before, men thought that computing was a characteristic of the human mind.
In his Pensées, Pascal wrote:
“The arithmetic machine does effects that come closer to thinking than anything animals do; but it does nothing that can make one say it has will, like animals.” (DeepL translation! )
« La machine d’arithmétique fait des effets qui approchent plus de la pensée que tout ce que font les animaux ; mais elle ne fait rien qui puisse faire dire qu’elle a de la volonté, comme les animaux. »
on Thursday, June 20, I will be giving this presentation again for the local RSE group in Munich:
Since this is a smaller gathering, it is more open to discussion and questions also during the presentation. Depending on the audience, I might try to provide a little background on what Fortran looks like, and what is it used for in practice.
I plan to update the slides over the upcoming days:
Are there any recent developments you feel we should be particularly proud about and are worth mentioning? The ones of the top of my head are
Great job Ivan, If you’re interested to include some info on our recent Linear Algebra effort for stdlib, you may want to take inspiration from the summaries of stdlib’s v0.5.0 and v0.6.0 releases:
We are finalizing an almost NumPy-full set of linear algebra operations @jeremie.vandenplas@hkvzjal and soon you should see a new release! I think the most exciting points that we’ve been able to achieve overall are:
A new, fully modernized LAPACK backend with quad-precision support
Seamless build process with CMake or fpm
Trivially use external tuned LAPACK libraries with 1 preprocessor flag
Extremely easy APIs, but also full expert interfaces with error control, external storage, etc. We’ve been working hard to enable excellent performance (subroutine interfaces, pure LAPACK, no allocations, etc).
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