Hello all and thanks for keeping the Fortran community alive! I want to give my two cents on the implicit none thing and its implications on other feats of the language.
Each line of code matters when handling large codebases: it has to be maintained, debugged, etc., so, I’m in full favor of actions that lead to more concise Fortran code (staying on the error-proof side).
I really loved how the 90/95/2003 standards brought Fortran into the array realm: one can have extremely compact code do complex things (think merge, forall, pack combined with elemental functions). If extended to classes and polymorphism, that could have evolved into a Matlab/Python/Julia-like language, with the advantage of being statically typed and fast. I think people love those languages cause they’re compact and easy, rather than cause variables can change type all the time.
However, that direction has been completely unwinded by the more recent iterations that are going back to do loops and greater verbosity. In other words, Fortran is getting closer to C+±like behavior, in which case though, it feels much easier/cheaper (and what most teams seem to be doing) to just re-write Fortran code in C++, that also enables a far larger pool of excellent libraries and tools to be used.