I am looking for something that helps higher-level documentation emerge
naturally from Discourse. Contributing documentation to fortran-lang
requires embracing a lot of infrastructure and a different set of skills
than Discourse. I have not seen much growth in the documentation there;
and very little that has emerged there from Fortran Discourse; even though
that seems like it should occur organically. I think at least a large reason why
is their is no easy path from one to the other.
A lot of information is dispersed thoughout this Discourse forum and
comp.lang/fortran that is not particularly easy to locate or browse. Chat
forums are even worse. The Fortran Wiki is perhaps the closest.
There are documents
o Index | Programming in Modern Fortran
and lists
o GitHub - urbanjost/index
o Fortran-code-on-GitHub/README.md at main · Beliavsky/Fortran-code-on-GitHub · GitHub
And repositories
o Netlib at The Univ. of Tennessee and ORNL
and various FAQ sites
o index/index.md at main · urbanjost/index · GitHub
o FAQ in Fortran Wiki
o Fortran FAQ
o FAQ — Fortran90 1.0 documentation
o FORTRAN 90 FAQ: Compilation and Execution
as well as the chat, Discourse, newsgroup and vendor forums and documents,
but even the standard itself is somewhat encumbered.
I see very few Fortran Discourse discussions evolving into contributions
to these other resources, and it seems like they should.
It has been a long-standing issue for me that the comp.lang newsgroup
never lead to producing much general reference material, and that the same
questions about comparing float values, what compilers are available,
and many other questions appear over and over. Maybe chatGPF or some
partnering with the Fortran Wiki could help. Discourse provides some type
of rating by displaying likes and number of reads and contributors. The
Wiki does not, so you are left to click though a lot of sites referenced
there in some cases. Each forum has different rules for contributions
or requires signing up for access, etc.
If there were something on Discourse more wiki-like that could be
community-edited, or upvoted as something that should appear in an FAQ as
an alternative I would find that more useful than a chat-like interface
myself. I think the suggestion that chatGPF et al. is the future for
teaching, documentation, suggestions, and chatting hits the nail on the
head though.
Until something else emerges, some extra effort to contribute directly to the Fortran Wiki or at least help maintain it’s lists of lists seems warranted. Wouldn’t it be great if there were “one-stop shopping” for Fortran material?
Remember the first time you went to the J3 site and expected to see many references and links?
Not even close to what you expected, right?