A story from ThreadSafe Diaries on Medium

[N2GJ]

Read “Fortran Is Dead, Wait, Actually It’s Back“ by ThreadSafe Diaries on Medium:

https://medium.com/@ThreadSafeDiaries/fortran-is-dead-wait-actually-its-back-0408435ec259 

I heard a rumor once that Dr. Joe Taylor wrote a bunch of stuff in Fortran ages ago. Is any Fortran code still evident in the WSJTx programs we use today?  

Inquiring minds want to know!

I cherished using my copy of "A Fortran Coloring Book" by Roger Kaufman! It predates all those "Blah, Blah for Dummies" books!

Stay safe & effective. Be well! 

73,

GJ
Gerry Jurrens N2GJ

NM Section Traffic Manager

ARRL Life Member
mailto:n2...@arrl.net
Albuquerque, NM USA
http://www.bosquearc.com

[Saied Seghatoleslami]

I looked on GitHub, 19.5% of WSJTX is in Fortran.

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[Rich - gmail]

For those interested in the details:

• C++52.3% 
• Fortran19.4% 
• Python18.8% 
• C7.7% 
• CMake1.3% 
• QMake0.1% 
• Other0.4%

---

Rich Freedman 
N2EHL

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[Michael Rauch]

Fortran is used a lot by scientific persons, who are not professional developers,  and learned it as their first, and maybe only, programming language.

Fortran now has object orientated features, and is very much alive.

“It is the craftsman not the tool”.

Mike

Mike K2VPX

mi...@cranbury.com

[John]

A few years ago Jamie got me a PDP-11 emulator that runs on a Pi (called PiDP-11) and I want to relive my youth so I just found a copy of my college Fortran IV text online and bought it. I’m not a programmer, just playing. But maybe I’ll learn something!

73, John

—-

John E. Pugh WJ3P

609-439-3076

On Aug 20, 2025, at 2:48 PM, Michael Rauch <mi...@cranbury.com> wrote:



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[Steve Huston]

I've got a PiDP-11 sitting right next to my Altairduino - an Altair
8800 replica that runs on an Arduino Due. Those kits were a lot of
fun to assemble! And yes I get a kick out of toggling a bootloader
into the front panel too. Now I just need to get my hands on a tape
reader...

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--
Steve Huston, W2SRH - https://srhuston.net
“And no one sings me lullabies, and no one makes me
close my eyes, and so I throw the windows wide and
call to you across the sky.” - Pink Floyd, “Echoes”

[Saied Seghatoleslami]

....and virtually every machine learning optimization program used by Python libraries is a link to a Fortran program.  These programs are complex to build and even more complex to debug and prove that they work reliably.  Once you get them working and prove their robustness, no one is going to back and try to rebuild them.

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[Daniel R. Marlow]

Hi,

 

   I used FORTRAN for many years for particle physics data analysis.   In the 1990’s the field switched to C++, and more recently a mixture of C++ and Python.   Some of the code deep down under the hood is probably still FORTRAN, but it’s been a long time since I encountered anyone actually writing new FORTRAN code (unless they were doing it without telling me!).    I must say that there were a lot of things about FORTRAN, but the lack of objects is a major disadvantage.

 

73,

Dan K2QM

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[Joseph Taylor]

As Saied wrote, GitHub says WSJT-X is about 20% Fortran. I suppose that is based on lines of code. ??

  But you may be interested to know that the unique "guts" of WSJT -- the protocol definitions, source encoding of message payloads, error control coding, and the decoders -- is nearly 100% Fortran. (The remainder of these things is C.) All signal processing is in Fortran.

The User interface is C++. It takes lots of lines of code, and lots of MB of library routines, to make all those pretty windows, GUI buttons to click, etc., etc.

Fortran is fast, memory efficient, and very good at procesing arrays with complex data. MAP65 and then WSJT-X are the first programs I ever wrote using C++. The original WSJT (2000 - 2011, more or less) used Python for the GUI.

  -- Joe, K1JT

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