@awvwgk thank you! This looks great. I’ve been using Sphinx for many projects and generally like it. I don’t have experience with customizing the layout, but I think we can do a good job at that. The most important part is to see if the translation works as we hope. If it does, then I am quite confident we can make it work.
I just pushed the sphinx files to my fork of the webpage in an orphaned branch:
Not much to see yet, the main page is there and all the posts from our news section, very experimental at the moment. If anyone is interested in collaborating on this, feel free to reach out. Any help is much appreciated.
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Welcome of the forum. And please also try to bring more people from Japan. We all speak “Fortran” here, so there’s no barrier really!
Re: “some students who started studying Fortran at university spit curses against Fortran on Twitter”, what do they curse about mostly? Is it the gaps in tooling around Fortran? Or they just think it’s not cool not knowing about modern Fortran and thus think they would prefer to be studying something else?
By the way, will it be possible for you and similarly minded peers of yours in Japan to reach out to the instructors/lecturers//professors at the universities in Japan where students learn Fortran to inform them about Fortran-lang and Fortran Wiki, etc. and thereby increase awareness around Fortran and its growing collaboration platforms online? Note many folks here can help with such communication and engagement.
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@themos
Yes, the NAG Japan web pages are the 2nd to 4th places in Google search results.
These are helpful pages as a language reference.
@vmagnin
Thank you for showing me the concrete work.
Last night, I called for participation in the task force via Slack in our community, and a few members responded. I’d like to start working with them.
@Beliavsky
There are several good online resources on Fortran written in Japanese, so I’d like to gather them and add the list to the Fortran Wiki.
Many of the curses they are spitting out are related to numerical algorithms, not Fortran. When they learn Fortran, they learn numerical computation as examples simultaneously, so they couldn’t seem to determine which one they didn’t understand.
The 2nd is old-style well-aged source codes with a mixture of 77 and 90. They think that Fortran is old-fashioned and not cool. They desire to learn more modern languages, like Python and Julia, rather than languages that they may not use in the future.
It is possible. I have already introduced our community and Fortran-lang community several times in small conferences and online communities.
Also, one of our community members is the chair of the High-Performance computing with Fortran Promoting Consortium, which promoted HPF. I’d like to submit a proposal to him to organize a symposium on Modern Fortran.
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The free-programming-books | 📚 Freely available programming books site has a List of Free Learning Resources In Many Languages. The English version had only two books, including one on Fortran 77, and I created an issue to add more. The site maintainers are responsive. There are no Fortran entries for the French, German, Japanese, or Spanish versions. People who know of free Fortran books and tutorials in English and other languages can create issues or pull requests.
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Surprisingly nobody mentions China and India. These two countries may have more Fortran users than all the other countries combined.
Based on my personal experience, the transition from Fortran to C++ in these two countries appears minimal compared to that in the US. In China, almost every university has a big civil engineering department that uses Fortran as the default programming language. India also has so many engineering & physics majors using Fortran (you can find plenty of Fortran tutorials & lectures on YouTube made by the Indian guys).
PS: There is no point to support other languages in Fortran discourse. That’s what the Fedora Linux forum does, and it turns out pretty messy.
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I think most Indian programmers can understand the technical literature in English. On GitHub I sometimes see Fortran code with comments in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese, but never Hindi or another Indian language.
It’s not clear which Indian language one would focus on. Looking at free-programming-books, I see much more material in Tamil than Hindi. Wikipedia lists 13 prominent Indian languages.
Chinese Fortran coders may be there:
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Err…about 9 months ago, looks like that someone did 
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Yes, currently this site can be seen as the center of Fortran community in China. I have learned a lot from it when I was a beginner in Fortran. And there is a QQ group of “Fortran Coder”, I believe most communication about Fortran in Chinese takes place here.
China has a great number of students majoring in science and engineering, who would use Fortran in their projects and works. Unfortunately, we have found many students are taught old-fashioned Fortran. They are even told to use Compaq Visual Fortran!
As a consequence, some of us group together to promote modern Fortran. We have advertised fortran-lang community and its projects, especially fpm, in the “Fortran Coder” QQ group. What’s more, we are planning to write a modern Fortran tutorial in Chinese: GitHub - fortran-fans/Modern-Fortran-Programming: 📔现代Fortran程序设计. We hope that Fortran will be more vigorous in the Chinese Fortran community.
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Thanks for this link, I saw that fortran-lang’s Twitter also @ fcode.cn, this is really a dream linkage.
Yes, there are still a large number of Fortran users doing scientific computing in China. We have a public welfare portal: fcode.cn, which provides many tools and ways for Chinese Fortran developers.
Most importantly, we also have 2 QQ groups:
-
Fortran 初学 (beginners) (QQ: 100125753) (members: 948/1000)
-
Fortran Coder (QQ: 2338021) (members: 2879/3000)
Unfortunately, there is an upper limit on the number of QQ group members, so these two groups are like Fortran schools, with some enrolled and some graduated.
We often (every day, every moment) discuss Fortran programming issues in these QQ groups.
We often joke, if these two QQ groups are disbanded, Fortran’s TIOBE ranking will move up to 5 places! (Because if we don’t have these groups, we need to search for Fortran tutorials on the internet)
There is also a small group of Fortran fans.
- fortran-lang (QQ: 707660285) (members: 10)
When the time is ok, we will contribute to the Chinese version of the fortran-lang website. (Link: Draft: Internationalization for fortran-lang by awvwgk)
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A new Fortran language standard needs to be approved by national bodies, as described by Steve Lionel. I think at least the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan have them. Is there a full list of which countries do? Does China or India have a national body that can vote to approve a Fortran standard?
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This seems to be a matter for the industry, and I don’t know if there is any national body in China to do such a vote, we are more of non-governmental Fortran groups. But I believe that if no Chinese organization has participated in the voting for the Fortran standard, a call to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic will quickly receive a response and a solution.
Or if someone (may be a member of ISO or Fortran committee) knows whether China is participating in the Fortran standard voting, they can give an answer. I really hope that our country can participate in the establishment of the new Fortran standard. After all, we have a large base of Fortran users. 
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I guess the Standardization Administration of P.R.C. is in charge of standardizing Fortran and other techniques in China.
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From my limited understanding, it seems that our country (China) has not made relevant progress in Fortran standardization in recent years. The Fortran national standards in China I can find are GB/T 9362-1988 and GB/T 3057-1996.
But I can’t even find the Fortran national standard .pdf that can be downloaded for free on the Internet.
The standard published in 1996 has to be said that it is too old. It seems that China has not paid much attention to the advancement of the Fortran standard recently. (However, it seems that other languages have not been updated for almost a long time.)
国家标准|GB/T 3057-1996 (samr.gov.cn) (Current Fortran notional standard in China) (It should correspond to the Chinese translation of the ISO standard at that time.)
This standard is equivalent to the ISO/IEC international standard: ISO/IEC 1539:1991.
I guess the Standardization Administration of P.R.C. is in charge of standardizing Fortran and other techniques in China.
It seems, yes, this department is in charge of the standardization of Fortran in China.
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Thanks to @henilp105’s great work on the webpage we can now finally translate the webpage. The source of the new webpage is available at
We already created stubs for the Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish (the six languages the fpm docs are localized in). The workflow is similar to the one we use for the fpm documentation and is based on the gettext toolchain.
We could also think about signing Fortran-lang up for a translation service like transifex or weblate, which provide an online translation editor and remove the need to modify the po-files locally.
If you have any experience with those or others, let me know.
Finally, in case anyone is interested in reviewing translations, comment here or in the @fortran-lang/i18n (if you cannot see the team, let me know) and I can add you to the reviewer team for the respective language.
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This reminds me of the Algol 60 compiler my university had decades ago on its newly acquired IBM machine (1130 I think). Before it arrived I knew that the compiler was French, and so I wondered whether BEGIN would become COMMENCE or COMMENCEZ. The machine actually needed COMMENCER. I had forgotten reading “Ne pas se pencher au dehors” in French railway carriages.
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I registered a project for the webpage and the fpm-docs at weblate: Fortran programming language @ Hosted Weblate and will apply there to get free hosting for our open source projects.
Translations can be submitted via the web interface and will than result in a PR opened by weblate at the respective repository. Here is one created for the fpm-docs: Translations update from Hosted Weblate by weblate · Pull Request #65 · fortran-lang/fpm-docs · GitHub, as you can see the attribution for the translation is also preserved.
Let me know what you think or if you encounter any issues.
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Hi Sebastian,
Very nice this tool.
many warnings related to Markdown links
I added a few more lines to the Spanish translation.
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We have a lot of links in the text blocks, I also noticed that this clutters things when translating. We could change the source to use
Text with [link][1].
[1]: https://example.com/
instead of
Text with [link](https://example.com).
The only drawback is that sphinx wouldn’t capture the link target anymore meaning it cannot be changed in case a localized version of the linked page is available.