Q: What Does "Retire" Mean?

The planned obsolesence of Fortran. The petition to the J3 Committee is to request they stop revising Fortran beyond F2003. It does not mean "Fortran is DEAD", or stop working on your existing Fortran and throw away all your Fortran.

This gesture from the authority (ie: not just some whiner with a web site) would formally signify to science and industry an end to the Fortran treadmill in which users first implement applications to using the existing language along with extensions and toolkits, and later reimplement them using intrinsics as they are incorporated into to the language.

Q: Who is the intended audience of this petition?

All computer users who perform numerical analysis or simulation that do not want to be computer scientists as well. Many of the signers are long time bread-and-butter Fortran users.

Q: What is the ideal outcome of the petition?

A discussion about the sustainability of Fortran followed by a sincere, thoughtful debate regarding Fortran's successors which would produce a choice of revolutionary programming languages which are useful to scientists.

Q: Lots of languages have these weaknesses, why pick on Fortran?

Fortran's 30 year history of backward compatibility and perpetually renewed promise of modernity is unique. The direct reuse of Fortran77 legacy codes has led to a layered programming model of Fortran77, Fortran90 (or later), and one or more levels of parallelism. This programming model is so far removed from the original task of numerical simulation that scientist users effectively become ad-hoc computer scientists and spend an inordinate percentage of their time studying and practicing the wrong science.

Q: If not Fortran, what?

I do not know what language users should use, but am fairly certain it's not all the same language. Because of institutional inertia, Fortran is not going away any time soon and there is time to make our final decisions later. The answers to the question "what next?" need not be constrained to existing languages.

Q: What right do you have to prevent anyone from using Fortran?

None, but that is not what I intended. I agree it is unfair and wasteful to ban Fortran, and comparing forced retirement with banning is reasonable. In the end, the petition, born of frustration, is as productive as it is binding.