I have to disagree on this point, students don’t need to know how to compile and link to write programs in Fortran. Of course this knowledge is required at some point, but not necessarily from the very beginning. I actually found it harmful to teach compiling and linking at the beginning because it distracts from the actual objective, which is learning to program. Especially the introduction of the build system (make) always was a major headache for the tutors.
We switched our course from compiling by hand or with a Makefile to completely use fpm. But we still offered both options via tabbed content in sphinx to allow the students to decide, since fpm was really new at this point and could break in unforeseeable ways. Our experience was quite positive since the students were really productive with fpm.