GH also needs to find a way to stop AI scraping of IP.

(Or not. It might be lucrative to host some novel algorithm on GH under a license permitting its use in generative LLM results, at a reasonable per-impression fee.)

When I want to autocomplete my code with IP scraped from github with all licensing removed, nothing beats an LLM.

Fortran has had dummy procedures (subprogram arguments that can be associated with subroutines or functions) since Fortran II.

Parentheses in Fortran have semantic meaning beyond precedence, so you would want to distinguish original parentheses from the inserted ones.

This might work if Fortran were portable, or if only one compiler were targeted.

The transition from assembly to C, as I remember it, didn't involve using automated IP theft of scraped licensed source code to generate slop that no human has understood up until it's thrown at a code reviewer, though.

Fortran has its problems with its standard and portability, but it is hardly a dead language yet.

(Raises aged hand sheepishly)

I have one on my desk that I often use for quick estimations. It boots up in zero seconds.

Github suggests reviewers to PR authors based on who's been modifying nearby code recently (ok, I don't know whether that's a general policy, but it happens to me all of the time). And for the past year or so I have been getting tagged to review more and more AI slop from newcomers to the project that we chose to maintain in public. I just immediately nope out of all reviews now if I don't recognize the submitter, because I don't scale enough to be the only actual human involved with understanding the code coming at me. This sucks for the newcomers who actually wrote the patch themselves, but I can't always tell. Put some misspellings in your comments and I'm actually more likely to review it!

FWIW, Fortran does have submodules.

I suppose we shall amend to "The determined Real Programmer will fix FORTRAN" ;)

But, for the folks who didn't grow up with the Real Programmer jokes, this is rooted in a context of FORTRAN 77. Which was, uh, not famous for its readability or modularity. (But got stuff done, so there's that)

I wrote a lot of F77 code way back when, including an 8080 simulator similar to that written by Gates and Allen used to build their BASIC for Altair. I don't know what language they wrote theirs in, but mine was pretty readable, just a bit late. And it was very portable - Dec10, VAX, IBM VM/CMS with almost no changes.

I think F77 was a pretty well designed language, given the legacy stuff it had to support.

It was well designed. Hence the "it got stuff done".

But it was also behind the times. And, if we're fair, half of its reputation comes from the fact that half of the F77 code was written by PhDs, who usually have... let's call it a unique style of writing software.

Indeed. Two PhD students came to see me when the polytechnic I worked for switched from a Dec10 to two IBM 4381s.

[them] How can we get our code to work on the IBM?

[me] (examines code) This only looks vaguely like Fortran.

[them] Yes, we used all these wonderful extensions that Digital provides!

[me] (collapse on the floor laughing) (recover) Hmm. Go see Mike (our VAX systems programmer). You may be able to run on our VAXen, but I can't imagine it running on the IBMs without a major rewrite. Had they stuck to F77 there would have been few problems, and I could have helped with them.

Portability is always worth aiming for, even if you don't get all the way there.

I'm so old, those jokes were about me.

Fogeys unite! ;) (They're about me, too)