I would love it if these projects were accompanied by a little blog post stating who the person is, why they decided to do it etc. for projects where it is obviously a labor of love.<p>Especially because of the effort it would take to get this working on a "dead" language. Like who are you? How did you decide to work on this for the pure joy of it? Why not Cobol? Why a web framework?
Also relevant: <a href="https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair</a>
Hello,<p>I wrote the 'fortran+fastcgi+nginx' thingy. It has evolved into <a href="https://github.com/rlcarino/heeds" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rlcarino/heeds</a>. Production live runs (and a little blog post about it) may be found at <a href="http://heeds.csu.edu.ph" rel="nofollow">http://heeds.csu.edu.ph</a>. Some students from a university connect to the runs with their Android phones without cell data cost via Facebook's Free Basics which is available in that part of the world. Usage instructions for students are in the FAQ of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/csuheeds/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/groups/csuheeds/</a>.<p>Why do it? It is a consulting gig.<p>Ric Carino
For those wondering why it's used, here's a write-up I found on Eric Raymond's blog comparing Fortran and C:<p><a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html</a><p>Some comparisons are dated. However, I think the older variants still have advantages in readability, more clear semantics, semantics closer to algorithm itself (esp mathematical functions), less guessing by compiler for optimizations, and maybe a few others. Those I listed seem to still be advantages over C in general or as it's commonly used.
This reminds me of the time I actually found myself charged with integrating a chunk of Fortran code compiled into a Windows DLL with an Excel sheet via VBA. The VBA side was straightforward if a little icky, but handling strings in Fortran was really giving me headaches. Documentation on Fortran, even down to basic syntax, seemed inconsistent and hard to find online. I think I got the project mostly working before I left that company for unrelated reasons.
Nice work! That home page, while admittedly simple, renders incredibly fast. Have you done any benchmarks / performance comparisons to other web frameworks?