Language Marketing for Julia compared to Fortran

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We’re all doing Fortran marketing here.

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Fortran clients?

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I have just discovered that site:
https://alternativeto.net/software/fortran/about/

There, Fortran is registered to be proprietary and the Official link is toward NAG. The OS are only Windows and Linux. Does someone have an account?

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Some nice marketing of Fortran and the Fortran Package Manager by @jacobwilliams:

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The risk of over-marketing should not be neglected.

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Pick a market zone and then develop a simple to use Fortran module to apply to the market zone.

ST.COM does not write programs to use their accelerometers, you have to write them yourself for your use.

This is a huge market, make Fortran the go to place to create programs for new ST.COM devices.

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Fireship just posted a Julia in 100 Seconds video, and it already has 100K views and 10K likes. It is well done. I have emailed the author suggesting a Fortran video.

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Julia advocacy can indirectly benefit Fortran when the two languages share features. If you want to justify Fortran’s not treating 0 as false and other integers as true, or not treating zero-sized arrays as false, this is a good polemic by Stefan Karpinski at Julia Discourse:

On the arbitrariness of truth(iness)

Occasionally someone will be annoyed that Julia requires an actual true or false value in conditionals, whereas many dynamic languages (including Lisps) allow arbitrary values in conditions and have rules about what count as “truthy” or “falsey” in that context.

…

Proponents of truthiness will generally argue that it’s obvious what values are truthy and which are falsey. What’s interesting about that line of reasoning is that even though it’s supposedly obvious, different languages completely disagree on what is or isn’t truthy. Most languages with truthiness have followed C’s example and consider zero to be false and non-zero values to be true. But not all of them!

…

You hopefully get the point: it’s almost as if these languages were just making up random [stuff] and then claiming that it’s obvious. If you want to know if a number is zero, compare it to zero. If you want to know if a string or array are empty, check if they’re empty.

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And what about C? In the preface “C is Punk Rock” of his 2012 book, B. Klemens wrote: “By all rankings, it it consistently the most popular language that doesn’t have a corporation or foundation spending money to promote it.”

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I own and have read the 21st Century C book but I must say that in the reality, the changes done to the Standard (say, starting from ANSI C) are not that big. If you compare the language evolution of Fortran (77->90 and beyond) or C++ (which I don’t know well but when I see modern C++ code I can hardly recognize the language I remember from 1990s or so) - I would call the C evolution minor

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The author would agree: over 260 pages, 100 pages are not really about C but rather about the environment tools. And in his “rock style”, he says that C++ is the best thing that could happen to C… because it allowed C to remain itself, a rather small language…

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https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Fortran improved five positions since April in Tiobe. I wonder how much of that rise is due to this group.

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See the Discourse post Fortran returns to top 20 TIOBE index concerning Fortran’s TIOBE adventures since April 2021.

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I will also use fortran for numerical stuff, when I can, because it is easy to learn and write.

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I am a fortran user, who needs and also wants to work with fortran due to colleges using it and it’s the go to in my field.
My main concern is that there are little to no “modern” tutorials or explanations.
I am a generation that likes to watch youtube videos, ask in the comments and gets examples in jupyter notebooks or google labs.
But what I find on google searches most of the time are broken links or references to websites that are made in the 80s.

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There are a number of people in this forum who write blogs, books and make youtube videos. Please take a look.

Best

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@mdeberts

Try this website: Learn Fortran

Also see this (if your background is python): Fortran90-rosetta

Also don’t hesitate to ask questions related to Modern Fortran in this discourse.

Good luck!

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Hi @mdeberts
concerning Fortran videos, see this post:

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@mdeberts regarding Jupyter notebooks, you can try LFortran, it’s in alpha, especially the interactive part. But it works in Jupyter. We are working very hard on it to get it to beta.

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