IntroductionΒΆ

Fortran is not dead - quite the opposite. And it is better than its reputation. I wrote this tutorial after having worked with Fortran (77 and 90+) for over a decade. During that time I have been exposed to many lines of code and I have seen what works and what fails. Good programming practices come from experience. And experience comes from bad programming practices. During the past decade I have written tons of horrible code and made every possible mistake. The result of this learning process and the aim of this tutorial is to give a short introduction into the features of Fortran that you will need and that will work, scale, and remain maintainable and manageable.

Managing code complexity is the key for writing maintainable code. Curiously, many scientists write code without ever worrying about maintainability. But it really is code complexity rather than performance that will decide whether your code will be still alive ten years from now.