This series shines a spotlight on open source developers who make a real difference. Too often, their contributions go unrecognised. By highlighting their achievements, this series aims to give these talented developers the recognition they deserve and to celebrate the dedication, creativity, and passion that drive the open source community forward.
Matthew Forrester Wolffe has one of those GitHub profiles that immediately caught my attention. Most people associate Fortran with scientific software and old codebases, but he has gone down a completely different road. Instead of using the language for the usual number-crunching work, he builds practical tools you would normally expect to find written in C, Rust, or Go.
That is what makes his open source work so interesting. His work is not merely of novelty value. There is a real idea running through the projects. He’s clearly interested in seeing how far modern Fortran can be pushed outside its usual territory. The repositories include a shell, a terminal text editor, a file explorer, a grep-style search tool, git helpers, and a command-line calculator. Taken together, they make a surprisingly strong case that Fortran can do much more than people give it credit for.
There is plenty of humour in the project names and descriptions, which gives the whole profile some personality, but the work itself is serious. These are proper tools, not throwaway experiments. That balance between playfulness and technical curiosity is what makes the account stand out.
In the end, Mr Wolffe’s open source contributions are interesting because he is not treating Fortran as a museum piece. He’s treating it as a language still worth experimenting with, still worth building with, and still capable of surprising people. That makes his GitHub repositories worth perusing.
I’ve covered a variety of his tools. In alphabetical order:
facsimile – terminal text editor offering offers VSCode-style keybindings.
ferp – Fortran Expression Regular Print (ferp) aims to be a clone of grep.
fortbite – a powerful mathematical calculator leveraging Fortran’s strengths in scientific computing, with arbitrary precision arithmetic, complex numbers, matrix operations, and extensive mathematical functions.
Fortress – a command-line file explorer with fzf integration and git binds for fast staging and committing.
fortsh – an experimental POSIX-compatible command shell.
fortty – a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator.
fuss – an interactive tree utility for complete git workflows.