@jeremie.vandenplas If you’re interested in helping with an intro to Modern Fortran course, check out this thread: Modern Fortran Carpentries course - #5 by samharrison7. I was pondering whether it would be worth developing a Carpentries course on Modern Fortran, which I think aligns nicely with your third aim.
My personal goal is to become a bit more involved in this community and try and set aside some time to contribute to the various initiatives. We have quite a few Fortran developers in our organisation, but I think most are stuck in the 90s, so my second goal is to be an evangelist for Fortran Lang and go spread the word of all the amazing new stuff that’s happening here.
I’d like to start contributing to LFortran for this
More courses and tutorials
I’m already working on my next course (details to come)
I’d like to find time and topics to put out more YouTube videos
What else I’d like to see:
More widespread Fortran 2018 support in compilers
(At least) Alpha releases of the upcoming compilers (flang, ifx, LFortran)
More tools, specifically things like:
a formatter (comparable to clang-format or similar tools for other languages)
a linter (comparable to clippy or similar tools for other languages)
An online learning environment
Think hosted Jupyter notebooks, but for Fortran (probably using LFortran)
I would be willing to collaborate on this
More widespread adoption of stdlib
I’d like to see sufficient, crucial functionality added and people using it (with fpm) to prove it’s value and ensure it won’t go away any time soon
I think the community has built up a lot of momentum and if we keep it up I think we can accomplish a ton this year. I’m very optimistic about the future.
With our interest in more and better documentation, we might consider applying for Google Season of Docs (GSoD) or Outreachy as well. Conda-forge very successfully improved their docs last year with several Outreachy internships.
I think all of my wishes for Fortran already got mentioned, so I just want to highlight the most important for me:
A collection of example codes for solving common problems (like reading a file, etc., optionally with suggestions for helpful libraries)
A community driven wiki with easily understandable tutorials and explanations to all Fortran features and functions. I know there are plenty tutorials scattered around the internet, but many times I don’t find what I need using DuckDuckGo or Google. So a “place to go” with all the information would be nice (maybe as a fortran-lang subdomain?)
Another personal goal for me and Fortran is a big one:
The technical college where I completed my master’s degree in Scientific Programming one year ago offers a Fortran lecture. But since the professor of this lecture retired some years ago and he wants to teach it for the very last time this February, I am going to take over his lecture! So this time I will assist him with the hands-on sessions, but next time (probably February 2023) I am going to be the new lecturer of Fortran. Therefore, I will use this year to refactor the lecture notes or maybe even create my own. I plan on sharing these under some kind of open-source licence, but I think this is enough for a own topic here in the discourse group. I will open a thread for this soon.
I’m probably going to be fairly busy for the next few weeks, but then things should slow down some and we should have some requirements and the beginnings of specs for the generics features, so that will be a good time to start working on it.
I’m thinking more “Fortran tutorial” oriented. I would expect usage caps, possibly with a subscription based model to limit hammering some poor server with HPC level workloads, but offer discounts and/or higher limits to students for learning purposes. Needs some more thought probably, but would definitely make Fortran more approachable (maybe even as easy as Matlab? )
Several posts mentioned creating more Fortran tutorials. I suggest that anyone who has put instructional Fortran material on GitHub use the fortran-tutorial tag for their repo. A few people did so at my request, and there are now 5 listed, but there are many more on GitHub. There are many repos for the topic python-tutorial, and it should be equally easy to find Fortran info.
I have been moving posts around a bit to keep this thread focused on the original topic, while giving the new discussions room to continue without inter-leaving with each other. Carry on.
Perfect! I was going to ask you to split the VS discussions. Everybody please keep posting your ideas, and we can split them into separate discussions as needed.