(j3.2006) Fortran user interest survey

[Bill Long]

On Jul 8, 2016, at 12:55 PM, Damian Rouson <damian at sourceryinstitute.org> wrote:

> I suggest including an open-ended question.  Would it also be useful to survey interest in broad concepts such as generic programming and programming by contract?  

I?d guess that most people will, on their own, ?think? of features that they already know about from other languages.   The most common shortcoming of Fortran that I hear about is a lack of templates (guess where that idea came from).  I?m not saying that?s a bad idea - a feature like templates that has been very successful in another language more or less similar to Fortran might be worth considering.   That said, we?ve tried that one before and found it very difficult.

> Would it be useful to include demonstrations of the form such concepts might take?

Possibly. But I?d be more interested in a ?use case?  - example of how the feature would be used and why it is a benefit.   We can decide how narrow or general that use case is as part of the discussion of the feature.  


>  Would it be useful to have links to past papers that committee members plan to propose again?  

No. It just puts (sometimes) bad ideas in people?s minds. 

> Do we want an optional question on user characteristics such as profession, employer, market sector, job title, application domain, and platform choice?  

Could be interesting.  But making it optional is important. 

> I will collect suggested questions and place them in a template on SurveyMonkey.com for committee review.

Thanks, Damian.

Cheers,
Bill



Bill Long                                                                       longb at cray.com
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