Twitch stream, book status, and other Fortran news
This week I did my first ever Twitch stream, hosted by my book publisher. I had fun doing it and now look forward to streaming more in my own channel. Without Manning I certainly wouldn’t consider streaming, so thank you for hosting me.
In the stream I did a 2-hour long programming session in which I implemented a minimal water wave simulator that’s the running example in the book. I just uploaded the code here — it’s cleaned up, commented, and includes a few bug fixes that I missed during the stream.
Now I itch to stream more live programming soon. If you want to stay in tune with future streams, follow me on Twitch or Twitter. Also, if you have any special requests for streaming topics, let me know!
When is the book coming out?
I’ve been working on the book since September of 2017 and many people are asking when the heck is it coming out in print already. The book entered production in late February and went through a complete round of copy-editing. The content is thus complete and there won’t be further additions. We initially expected the print to come out in July, however this has been pushed back to the Fall 2020 due to COVID-19. If you buy the book now, you’ll get the complete ebook immediately and the print when it’s ready to ship.
Open source Fortran community on the rise
Other exciting news are that of a rapid development in the open source Fortran community in the past several months.
It all started in October last year when Ondřej Čertík created the GitHub repository for the community to collaborate on proposals for the Fortran Standards Committee. The repo has been so successful that to date over 150 issues discussing changes to Fortran have been discussed. Several of these issues evolved to proposal papers that were discussed at the February J3 meeting. One of the issues in the proposals repository sparked a community-developed Standard Library, which soon after led to the beginning of the Fortran Package Manager — which I demoed in the Twitch stream — and a Fortran website that features tutorials, a mailing list, a discussion board, and a monthly newsletter. Could we be heading toward the second golden age of Fortran? I think so.
If you’re finding out about these projects for the first time, here are all the links you need to know about:
- https://fortran-lang.org — the website
- https://fortran-lang.discourse.group — Fortran Discourse
- https://groups.io/g/fortran-lang — Mailing list
- https://github.com/fortran-lang/stdlib — Fortran Standard Library
- https://github.com/fortran-lang/fpm — Fortran Package Manager
- https://github.com/j3-fortran/fortran_proposals — Community proposals for J3
- https://twitter.com/fortranlang — fortran-lang on Twitter
None of these projects existed only 9 months ago. I’m amazed how far they’ve come.
