Traits, Generics, and modern-day OO for Fortran

This is all quite impressive, but I have a word of caution. I was involved, decades ago, in a project with research-grade programming languages and type systems (https://research.ibm.com/publications/the-type-inference-and-coercion-facilities-in-the-scratchpad-ii-interpreter). The bitter lessons that I learned:

  1. There are very few people who can master the abstractions and use them effectively (roughly, the top 1% of academic applied-mathematicians and computer-scientists)
  2. The queue of edge cases needing clarification seemed to never end. This problem was hidden by the fact that only one implementation existed, and so became the definition of behaviour. A misty landscape.
  3. Language experts got bored (presumably) with the implementation chores and moved to other projects, leaving the implementation without expert support.
  4. Early adopters of the fancy features found it difficult to translate their insights to other environments and consequently their influence among their peers waned.
  5. Despite the promise, big breakthroughs were achieved by other attempts, some being heroic one-man efforts with a far more pedestrian programming language.
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