For whom Fortran? For what?

Language enhancement
20

I have thought this and felt there needs to be a better consensus and understanding and care and passion toward whom Fortran language seeks to serve for their programming needs.

Hence the question for “For whom Fortran? For what?”

Consider several fields:

  1. A developer-user in the supercomputer domain working with code authored individually or only a few other subject-matter experts in legacy FORTRAN plus possibly non-standard extensions plus certain features since Fortran 90 and where code changes and refactoring occur over decades of planning and validation.
  2. Developer-users of commercial/non-profit libraries and applications toward a few specific scientific/technical domains on targeted platforms (usually Windows and *UX) who need to interoperate with processors other than Fortran and who need to remain competitive (wrt whatever measures they see fit) and move rapidly with various “customer” and “market” requirements,
  3. One-person teams of developers of all kinds who use Fortran as part of their pursuits, whether professionally in industry/research/academia or personal hobbies,
  4. Large teams globally in industry/research/academia/intergovernmental agencies, etc. looking to build new huge applications, say massive simulation frameworks involving multiphysics architectures, to tackle big problems e.g., transform the global energy sector away from its dependence on fossil fuels and who want to use modern Fortran from the ground up.

The perspective and rating of core language features can differ considerably just among the above 4 fields. I am likely missing out on other scenarios involving Fortran.

I feel the standard development thus far has been influenced greatly by field #1 above and this includes resistance to change in several aspects.

Forums such as these tilt more toward field #3, the individual “warriors”.

But it will be useful to understand for whom all Fortran seeks to serve and for what. Are those in fields 2 and 4 above also to be served and if so, how and to what extent and at what pace? What about others?

Can this lead to a vision for Fortran and eventually mission for standard-bearers to advance the language rather than the ad hoc but somewhat minimalist approach now toward each revision?