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Joe Wallwork, Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge, jw2423@cam.ac.uk

October this year will mark seventy years since the first Fortran manual, making it a very well established programming language for scientific computing. Over its seven decades of usage, many high quality learning resources and tools have been developed for Fortran. However, their visibility has historically been poor in the community, with groups often sticking to the resources and tools that they were aware of.

The situation has been greatly improved by the fortran-lang community initiative, which provides standard tooling, community platforms, and the fortran-lang website, which holds a large volume of useful information. However, there are still enchancements that could be made to allow fortran-lang to better serve the community. For example, having finer-grained categories and the ability to search by tags in the package index would be very useful.

Young man (Joe) in red checkered shirt and brown trousers giving a talk in front of slides titled 'Fortran Index - It starts with one...'

Fortran index is a hackathon series that was born out of the Back to the Fortran Future satellite event of RSECon back in 2024. Roughly every two months, the attendees of Fortran index hackathons meet virtually to work on improvements for fortran-lang - particularly its package index. Some additions and corrections are made but the focus is on improving the way that information is presented and curated so that the community can more easily find the information that they seek.

I am happy to announce that I was recently awarded a Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) fellowship to further the efforts of Fortran index in 2026. Watch this space for useful improvements. The funding associated with the fellowship will support attending events to network with potential contributors both inside and outside the Fortran community (e.g., web developers) and also hosting the first in-person hackathon in Cambridge in the autumn… along with a 70th Fortran birthday for Fortran! This will be a hybrid event and cake will be provided for in-person attendees, of course. (Further details to follow.)

The next hackathon will be held virtually on 5th March 2026 - see the event page for more details.