upvote
You are not the first one to ask :)

We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon. Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :)

When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc.

Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty.

Both Cobolsky and Fortransky looks great on Swordfish90’s cool-retro-term, but we are building our own terminal for Fortransky too. There is a blog post with screenshots over at Patreon/formerlab

Can’t get enough Fortran

reply
> The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it

If you don't mind me asking, why is the world better with more Fortran-based software?

reply
Our modern languages are built on it, and it’s incredibly fast,

so it deserves to be kept alive. We owe a great deal to the people who wrote it in the 1950s I guess

reply
> Our modern languages are built on it

It's part of the lineage, yeah, probably started with Algol though? Fast I guess is always nice, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep it alive solely for that, at least to me.

reply
I think the best answer you're really going to get here is that it's cool and fun to learn and use old languages.
reply
I'd agree with all of those reasons! I do so myself as well, was just specifically curious about the "The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it" part. Don't get me wrong, I've spent too many nights learning "dead" languages too, but never with the idea that the world would be better if I published more code in these dead languages, it's just for my own gratification and learnings.
reply
This thread makes me happy
reply
I came here to suggest COBOL as a better fit, then saw your comment a few levels up in this thread.

Out of curiosity, does your implementation use CODASYL?

(For people that don't pay much attention to historical software systems, most CODASYL implementations were similar to JSON document databases, so going that way isn't as crazy as it sounds.)

reply
Great comment! Thanks!

No CODASYL, the JSON parser is hand-rolled Fortran with a depth-tracking key scanner

CODASYL not a crazy direction for the feed composer

Got more depth to explore here, still early :)

reply
How do COBOL and Fortran compare for something like this ?
reply
COBOL is more painful, Fortran better.

Good you raised the topic, can write a blog post on it when we ship Cobolsky. Will be a proof of concept repo. Fortransky is the one

(If AT Proto did fixed-width records instead of JSON, COBOL would be formidable)

reply
> why fortran?

why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.

reply
Fortran will survive the cockroaches even, when the world 404s
reply
Your code will work unchanged until you try to change compilers or your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language.
reply
> your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language

Like all the 3 of them they added in the last 30 years, and that compiler vendors are not enforcing anyway because they don’t want to annoy their users?

Windows’ backward compatibility is a joke compared to Fortran.

reply
Great, can we see some benchmarks?
reply
Cobolsky holds the record for most surprised looks per line of code :)

Fortransky benchmarks pending

the feed scorer will have real numbers worth reporting

Whenever time allows in future: Fortran vs Go vs Python

reply
maybe they weren't really concerned about portability or a decent standard?
reply
It’s keyboard navigation only, and we got the Bluesky firehose raw straight into the Rust decoder. Or we switch mode to Jetstream with m+EnTER :)

You hit l+ENTER to like a post. If anyone replies from Bluesky, we hit n+ENTER and see the notifs. And so on

Fortransky is 70% Fortran, rest is Rust, C and a tiny Python helper

reply