Patience is Key

Over the weekend, I spoke with a retired Electrical Engineer, Bob. While we were chatting the topic of software somehow came up and the difference between today’s programming versus it’s past. We discussed how much things have changed from the 1960s to the present day. Bob had gone to WPI in the mid to late ’60s and was an Engineering Major. He enjoyed math and naturally gravitated toward the Engineering field but one day he realized how utilizing programs could help him compute highly complex math problems. Like everyone, he had to start his journey somewhere and the best language that seemed suited for him at the time was Fortran. Fortran is a very old language and I honestly didn’t know much about it, past that it was created at the time of punch cards and operators who compiled your programs for you. Bob would place his punch cards into a mailing box marked with the last 3 of his social. He said if he was lucky, the next afternoon the code was run. Normally, he said it would take about 2-3 days before getting your results back. Once returned, say if there was a period instead of a comma, a message would say “Program Terminated” or something along that. This is when the debugging process begins by carefully examining the code above the “terminate” message. Once the issue was found, he would fix it and then start the waiting process all over again.

Today, we can run code in seconds, be able to debug and fix code in minutes, then re-run the code again. I’ve spent 6 hours in the past incrementally fixing and building a project for class and looking back I have a newfound appreciation for the tools and languages that aid us in programming today. But this made me think, what is Fortran and how was it used?

To my surprise, while being a language seemingly in limbo, there is still a strong community surrounding the language. I found this article on Medium.com detailing a year’s journey attempting to revitalize and attract new programmers to Fortran. Over that one year, work had been done to implement a better-improved standard library (stdlib), a lot of focus and progress was being made into creating a Fortran Package Manager (fpm), and a website was used to bring the community together while also to help retain new learners instead of letting them struggle alone. While the modernization of the language still has some ways to go, the patience and commitment from the contributors to the stdlib, fpm, and website just show how patience is key to creating the best possible end product.

This reminds me of the saying “Slow is Smooth and Smooth is fast” which resonates with software developers since the moment you rush yourself is when things end up half-baked and many issues arise. I should take my time more, that way I could catch small mistakes that can potentially snowball into more complex issues.

Article Link: https://medium.com/modern-fortran/first-year-of-fortran-lang-d8796bfa0067