Posts by Connor Aird
Back to the Fortran Future 3
- 05 May 2026
The Software Sustainability Institute’s (SSI) Collaborations Workshop 2026 attracted around a hundred researchers, research software engineers (RSEs), and other research technical professionals (RTPs) to sunny – yes, sunny – Belfast to discuss the future of the digital research landscape: alternative academic career paths, the impact of AI, green computing, and more. But before that, a small number of eccentric individuals gathered at a secretive location to discuss something much older: Fortran, the language to have survived more false obituaries than any other. Back to the Fortran Future 3 brought together some of the more dedicated members of the UK Fortran community to coordinate, strategise, and discuss an exciting new opportunity.
This workshop series started as a satellite event of RSECon 2024 in Newcastle, where the focus was on bringing together the community and identifying our shared challenges. Fortran developers have historically been an isolated bunch, and the 2024 workshop served as a lightning rod, drawing in RSEs, educators, and community managers from across academia, national labs, and industry, from the UK and beyond. It spawned a number of new initiatives, including the Fortran Index Hackathon series, which aims to improve the Fortran-Lang website and make it easier to find useful Fortran packages, and the Fortitude linter, which performs static analysis of Fortran code to help RSEs and computational scientists write safer, cleaner, and more modern software.