Well like you said, Fortran didn't actually go anywhere. Fortan 77 is a terrible programming language, but you can't seriously claim it "disappeared from the Earth".

Not that long ago tsoding was like "I should learn Fortran" and wrote a bunch of Fortran. Obviously from his perspective some things about Fortran are awful because it's very old, but it wasn't somehow impossible to do.

There are a few really amazing things which have been achieved in C++ like fmt, a compile time checked, userspace library for arbitrarily formatting variadic generic parameters. That's like man on the moon stuff, genuinely impressive. Mostly though C++ is a garbage fire and so while it's important to learn about it and from it we should not keep doing that.

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Yoric 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> There are a few really amazing things which have been achieved in C++ like fmt, a compile time checked, userspace library for arbitrarily formatting variadic generic parameters.

Anecdotal, but that's hardly unique to C++. So even if C++ were to disappear overnight (which we all agree won't happen), this wouldn't be a burning-library-of-Alexandria moment.

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tialaramex 2 days ago | parent [-]

Well. What other examples of this feat are you thinking of?

To me the things which come to mind are either compiler magic (e.g. C printf) or they rely on RTTI (e.g. Odin and similar C-like languages) and neither of those is what fmt does, they're "cheating" in some sense that actually matters.

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Yoric 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I co-implemented this in OCaml ~20 years ago, using no compiler magic (it did use a macro). Pretty sure that I've seen the equivalent in Haskell, too, and in variants of Scheme. Zig has it, too. And while, as you mention, the Rust implementation does use compiler magic, I'm pretty sure that it could be implemented as a macro, just more slowly.

etc.

	▲	Yoric 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		(sorry, it wasn't you who mentioned it, but it was a good remark nevertheless :) )

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int_19h 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/macro.format.html

https://zig.guide/standard-library/formatting/

	▲	notmywalrus 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Rust is an example of "compiler magic" in this case. You're right about Zig, and reading the source [1] I'm still kind of impressed how unified they made comptime / runtime. [1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/32a1aabff78234b428234189...

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pklausler 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Judging Fortran by looking at Fortran 77 is preposterously uninformative.

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worthless-trash 2 days ago | parent [-]

What should we be looking at ?

	▲	slavik81 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		If we're judging the state of Fortran in 2025, we should probably be discussing Fortran 2018 or Fortran 2023.