Eddy Brinkman of Betase first came into contact with the Fortran programming language in the early 1990s, during his MSc graduation work from his Chemical Engineering studies. After years of working in other fields as well (mainly providing technical documentation of equipment for gas and liquid flows), he recently revived his Fortran coding activities.

The current era, with much more powerful computer hardware than in the 1990s, and also with artificial intelligence (AI) as a programming tool, is a very appropriate time for efficient computer code and high performance computing. Think of technical-scientific calculations or computer simulations of gas, liquid and heat flows (computational fluid dynamics, CFD), but also simply to process large amounts of data (pattern recognition, data crunching), or to program tools. Fortran is ‘key’ in processing arrays and doing matrix calculations efficiently.