Vic Smith wrote:
....

Just guessing, but my estimate is 90% of programming is
business/finance related.

By what measure? Unless it is in a nonprofit or academic setting, one
could say that _everything_ is business related since that's what
companies are about.

OTOH, if one is talking of either LOC or other measures of actual code
generation, I'd venture direct financial or business applications still
remain a subset.

....
and that Fortran could easily be replaced by COBOL with calls to
assembler sub-routines. No Fortran at all in the mix.
But why bother disturbing Fortran fans? If it's working for them
that's good enough.

What one really shouldn't do is to make rash assertions w/o some basic
knowledge of the area at all.

"Theoretically possible" doesn't come even close to equating to
"easily". I would venture that you're not even aware that there is
still active development of the Fortran Standard and modern features
continually being added to the language that include object-oriented
features, etc., etc., etc., ...

What Fortran has that none of the alternatives you've mentioned have is
support for vector processing and other features suited to massive
computing that are simply not amenable to the models you've outlined nor
are there suitable compilers for much of the hardware used in those
computing environments of the type. If you were to take and try to
accomplish the computation in a fashion as you've outlined above,
besides taking orders of magnitude longer to develop you'd find that it
wouldn't have adequate performance to be of any use in the end, anyway.

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