Add deRSE23 submission abstract

[ivan-pi]

Any suggestions welcome!

[vmagnin]

Ivan, I will be pleased to contribute in various ways (ideas, content, feedback...) Amazing the abstract is still too long! 750 characters is really short...

Concerning the two first sentences of the 2nd paragraph, we could gain 30 characters by merging both:

I will share the motivations of the new Fortran-lang community concerning the Fortran package manager, standard library, website, and other tools.

[ivan-pi]

Thanks for your comments. I've slashed it down to 738 characters by picking shorted adjectives and verbs, and rephrasing a few sentences.

@aslozada, personally, I wouldn't like to make it sound like we are the first and last one. There are also other communities such as comp.lang.fortran, the maintainers of the Fortran Wiki, and the FortranCon conference. What do you think about "Introducing the Fortran-Lang community"? It's essentially my goal to introduce Fortran-Lang to a wider community of research software engineers (in Germany).

[ivan-pi]

I'm not too happy with the long words in this sentence:

Fortran-lang aims to provide a central place for Fortran users, complementing the language standardization committee and compiler vendor communities.

Maybe,

Fortran-lang aims to provide a junction point for Fortran users, complementing the existing language standardization bodies and compiler vendor forums.

[aslozada]

@ivan-pi Of course. It's just a provocative title.

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"Introducing the Fortran-Lang community" as title sounds good.

[ivan-pi]

Thanks everyone. We now stand at 748 characters.

• Would you prefer to describe Fortran-lang as the "central home" or a "junction point"?
• W.r.t. the language learning curve, is reduce the right verb? Maybe soften/ease/lessen would be better.

[vmagnin]

* Would you prefer to describe Fortran-lang as the "central home" or a "junction point"?

Or "hub"? "main hub"? "Fortran hub"?

[awvwgk]

W.r.t. the language learning curve, is reduce the right verb? Maybe soften/ease/lessen would be better.

I like ease best, maybe like in ease the start into Fortran, rather than reduce the learning curve of Fortran.

[beddalumia]

What about flatten (for the learning curve)? Otherwise ease is what I prefer among the ones mentioned. And that's just four chars :)

[beddalumia]

After a slow re-reading of the whole (which I like a lot!) I might go as well for soften the learning curve, but ease sounds good too.

If we are considering broader rewrites of the sentence maybe join the two parts in something like "boost adoption by making the language and the tooling more accessible", which in my mind describes better the whole group of efforts (fpm and push for new semantics is more about tooling and working on the language itself, something broader than just easing the learning).

About the other point I'd like "central hub".

[Carltoffel]

@ivan-pi Of course. It's just a provocative title.

If you want to provoke: "Fortran - The Revival of a Language That Never Died"

[vmagnin]

Edit: sorry for the noise, I just realised that the deadline for submission has already passed sweat_smile

@epagone , the deadline is today. The conference being German, my understanding is that it should be closed tonight at 00:00 UTC+1, as suggested by Ivan's message on the Discourse (he said yesterday evening there were 28 hours left).

[shahmoradi]

Thanks, ivan-pi for leading this. Regarding the title and contents, the Fortran community should migrate away from titles and sentences that associate Fortran with negative words, even if the phrases are well intended. Search engines constantly parse web content and associate words with their proximity. Putting words such as death, dead, legacy, obsolete next to "this" language silently promotes negativity around the language of choice.

[vmagnin]

Following @shahmoradi comment, the sentence:

Despite Fortran’s role in science and engineering and the evolution of the language itself, attracting new users and retaining existing ones has been a challenge for Fortran.

could be made less dramatic with something like:

Despite Fortran’s role in science and engineering and the evolution of the language itself, Fortran is now in competition with many other languages.