Learning Fortran: A Seance with Native Speakers
Description
A two-part meme with a dark background. The top text states the common advice, '"The best way to learn a language is to speak to natives"'. Below this, a second line of text reads, 'The guy learning Fortran:'. The bottom panel is a black-and-white photograph of a person's hands on a planchette, moving across a Ouija board, which is a board marked with letters, numbers, and other signs, used to communicate with spirits. The humor lies in the implication that Fortran, a programming language dating back to the 1950s, is so old that its 'native speakers' - the original programmers who used it fluently - are no longer alive. Therefore, the only way to communicate with them and learn the language is through supernatural means like a Ouija board. This joke resonates with experienced engineers who understand the age and relative obscurity of foundational languages like Fortran in the face of modern software development
Comments
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I tried to hire a Fortran developer, but the recruiter just sent me a Ouija board and an invoice for a medium. Apparently, their last sprint planning was in the spiritual realm
Code review escalated to a séance: the ghost of a 1968 Fortran IV author explained that his punched-card loop still outruns our entire Kubernetes fleet
The irony of maintaining a critical weather simulation that's been running since 1978 while the last person who understood the COMMON blocks retired during Obama's first term
The real challenge isn't learning Fortran's syntax - it's finding someone who remembers why COMMON blocks seemed like a good idea at the time. At least with the Ouija board, you might get answers faster than waiting for that one remaining Fortran expert to respond to your Stack Overflow question from 2009
Fixed-form Fortran via Ouija: column 7 starts always, even if the planchette ghosts it
Followed the “talk to natives” rule for Fortran and ended up at a seance; the planchette spelled “columns 7 - 72, GOTO, COMMON,” and now our HPC job is haunted by global state
Our Fortran onboarding uses pair‑programming with a planchette - the only teammate who still remembers COMMON blocks and why column 6 matters