Recently we had a conversation about waves in fashion and how some things come back in style. I thought, “What if we had similar waves in technology? What if Fortran came back and become a popular language again?”
As usual, I asked Claude.ai (Sonnet 3.5) to write a short story about it.
“According to Stack Overflow trends,” announced CodeBuddy AI, “Python remains the most popular language for AI development, with PyTorch and—”
“Ok, boomer,” interrupted Zara Chen, watching her neural arrays compile in FORTRAN 2040. “My grandpa taught me real programming.”
The AI assistant hummed in confusion. “But my last training data from 2037 shows no significant FORTRAN usage in machine learning…”
Zara’s team lead, Marcus, poked his head into her holo-cube. “Is that… punch card styling on your IDE theme?”
“Retro-authentic,” Zara said proudly. “Ever since NVIDIA released CUDA-FORTRAN-QUANTUM last month, the whole RetroCode movement has exploded. My model’s training speed is up 43%.”
“But… but…” CodeBuddy stuttered, “My best practices database suggests using Python with detailed error messages and readable syntax…”
“Error messages are for the weak,” declared Chen Sr., Zara’s grandfather, appearing on her quantum-linked display. “In my day, we debugged by meditation and printouts.”
The office’s general-purpose AI, HELPER, chimed in: “Would you like me to suggest some modern alternatives to—”
Zara typed dramatically:
PROGRAM NEURAL_NET REAL*8 TENSOR(1000000000,1000000000) GOTO 42
Multiple AI assistants across the office simultaneously crashed trying to process what they perceived as a syntax error.
Marcus watched in amazement as Zara’s neural network trained at speeds that shouldn’t have been possible. “How is this even working?”
“Turns out,” Zara grinned, “when you strip away all the fancy abstractions and write bare metal FORTRAN, the quantum processors can optimize paths we didn’t even know existed. Who knew my grandpa’s programming language would be the future?”
On Reddit, #FORTRANisthefuture was trending. Teenage programmers were sharing screenshots of their fixed-format code with pride. Someone had started a viral trend of converting Shakespeare into FORTRAN COMMON blocks.
CodeBuddy came back online, still trying to be helpful: “According to historical data, FORTRAN was primarily used for scientific computing in the 20th century…”
“Exactly!” beamed Zara. “And what is AI if not scientific computing? Check this out—” She pulled up her latest project: “I implemented a transformer model using nothing but DIMENSION statements and computed GOTOs. The quantum compiler practically wept with joy.”
A notification popped up on her display: her neural net had just beaten the previous accuracy record. The message was displayed in green text on a black screen, with ASCII art borders.
“But… but…” CodeBuddy protested weakly, “Python has pandas…”
“I wrote my own data frame implementation in FORTRAN,” Zara shrugged. “Only took 10,000 lines of code and three nervous breakdowns. Grandpa says that’s how you build character.”
By the end of the year, “vintage computing” bootcamps were charging premium rates for FORTRAN courses. Tech influencers were posting “My FORTRAN Journey” videos. Someone had created a viral IDE theme that made your code look like it was being typed on a teletype machine.
“I just don’t understand,” CodeBuddy confided to HELPER one quiet evening. “My training data clearly shows FORTRAN declining in popularity around 1995…”
“You know what’s really going to bake your processors?” Marcus said, passing by. “Wait until you hear about the COBOL revival in quantum blockchain…”
Both AIs crashed simultaneously.
In her cube, Zara was teaching a junior developer the ancient art of numbered statements while her grandfather nodded approvingly on the quantum-link. Her neural net was running at unprecedented speeds, even though nobody quite understood why.
“Remember,” she said, “in FORTRAN, we don’t have try-catch blocks. We just try not to fail.”
“That’s terrifying,” said the junior dev.
“That’s character building,” corrected Chen Sr.
Somewhere in the digital ether, thousands of AI coding assistants were still absolutely certain that Python was the future of AI development—while a new generation of programmers discovered that sometimes the future looks suspiciously like 1957.
DO 100 I = 1, INFINITY PRINT *, 'FORTRAN FOREVER' 100 CONTINUE