Enthusiasm on the Fortran standards committee
The Fortran language standards committee, SC22/WG5, has an unusual situation on its hands. Two people have put themselves forward to chair the committee, when the current chairman’s three year term ends. What is unusual is that it is often difficult to find anybody willing to do the job.
The two candidates are the outgoing chair (the person who invariably does the job, until they decide they have had enough, or can arm wrestle someone else to do it), and a scientist at Los Alamos; I don’t know either person.
SC22 (the ISO committee responsible for language standards), and INCITS (the US Standards body; the US is the Fortran committee secretariate) will work something out.
I had heard that the new guy was ruffling some feathers, and I thought good for him (committees could do with having their feathers ruffled every now and again). Then I read the running for convenor announcement; oh dear. Every committee has a way of working: the objectives listed in this announcement would go down really well with the C++ committee (which already does many of the points listed), but the Fortran committee don’t operate this way.
The language standards world appears to be very similar to the open source world, in that they are both driven by the people who do the work. One person can have a big impact in the open source world, simply by doing the work, but in the language standards world there is voting (people can vote in the open source world by using software or not). One person can write papers and propose lots of additions to a standard, but the agreement of committee members is needed before any wording is added to a draft standard, which eventually goes out for a round of voting by national bodies.
Over the years I have seen several people on a standards committee starting out very enthusiastic, writing proposals and expounding them at meetings; then after a year or two becoming despondent because nothing has happened. If committee members don’t like your proposal (or choose to spend their time on other proposals), they do nothing. A majority doing nothing is enough to stop something happening.
Once a language has become established, many of its users want the committee to move slowly. Compiler vendors don’t want to spend all their time keeping up with language updates (which rarely help sell more product), and commercial users don’t want the hassle of having to spend time working out how a new standard might impact them (having zero impact on existing is a common aim of language committees).
The young, the enthusiastic, and magazines looking to sell clicks are excited by change. An ISO language committee is generally not the place to find it.
Update
INCITS have nominated the current chair for the next three-year term.
Thanks Derek for this post. I am the scientist at Los Alamos you mentioned who runs for the WG5 Convenor position. Derek and I discussed this over email a bit and I think in the end we only disagree on the extent other people will pitch in to help and whether I get burned out by the overall slow process.
Derek mentioned the announcement blog post that provides a high level overview and motivation, but I also encourage people to read the actual platform pdf document [1], which has the details of what actual issues there are at the committee as I see them, and how I propose to work with the Committee to fix them. Just one example out of the document of a practice that I want to change: drafting wording in committee is a very inefficient use of time, rather only papers submitted before the meeting should be discussed.
I also mention in the pdf what the role of the WG5 Convenor is: “responsible for presiding at meetings and ensuring that the program of work for that body is carried out in a prompt, efficient, and effective manner”.
It is precisely this role that I am running for and where I believe I can greatly help with my skills. As a Convenor, my job would not be to push any kind of particular papers, but rather work with the existing committee, make the whole process more efficient, involve the community more, and if in 3 years people outside the committee are predominantly saying “you guys are doing a great job, keep it up!”, then I will have succeeded as the Convenor.
If anyone is looking for ways how they can help, we have created a J3 GitHub repository for proposals for the Fortran Standard Committee [2], go ahead and open a new issue or discuss existing issues. We have got a lot of enthusiasm from the wider Fortran community there, and several members of the wider community created new proposals for the Committee and we have already discussed a few papers from there at the last committee meeting, and we will be discussing more at the next meeting. Also more and more members of the committee are participating there, and I think it’s accurate to say that most members of the committee see this as a valuable resource at this point.
This GitHub repository was the initial catalyst for other efforts, such as the Fortran Standard Library [3], the Fortran Package Manager [4] and the Fortran website [5]. We welcome any help with these efforts also.
The situation for Fortran is dire. There is not suger coating. However that is why I joined the Committee and why I did my best to organize our Fortran community to help fix Fortran and I am very humbled by the overwhelmingly positive response and so many people joining the effort. There is a long way ahead and a lot of hard work on all fronts. But we got momentum. If we can keep it, I think we can turn the tide for Fortran eventually.
If anyone wants to discuss anything related to Fortran or my run, I’ll be happy to.
[1] https://ondrejcertik.com/wg5/platform_and_experience.pdf
[2] https://github.com/j3-fortran/fortran_proposals
[3] https://github.com/fortran-lang/stdlib/
[4] https://github.com/fortran-lang/fpm/
[5] https://fortran-lang.org/