How many times have you learned Fortran in your life?

@FortranFan has a valid point, at least for me it never felt like I relearn a language but more like a gradual process of discovering more possibilities and applying them to my projects. Only recently I hit a point with Fortran where there seems to be no more to discover and the language sometimes feels incomplete or clunky.

But maybe I’m not long enough around here, judging from the other comments. I started in 2017 basically from scratch using a C++ tutorial but coding it up in Fortran, it was a great C++ tutorial because it was a guide on electronic structure methods and (procedural) programming and I had to learn both at this point. From there I started gradually learning Fortran by trial-and-error, compiler warnings and existing source code while discovering and applying new concepts.

At least for me the biggest change in my perception of Fortran (and programming languages in general) was joining the open-source community in 2019 by pushing my first real-world project on GitHub. I was expecting to get a lot of response on the implementation, source code, whatever… instead I got questions about installation, compilers and deployment. To me it felt like Fortran was never the problem, just the tooling (in fact it turned out there are good tools for Fortran around).

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