Since you honored me by referencing my article, I’ll offer my interpretation. Notices he says “the language”. At the time, Fortran was the language for numerica

Since you honored me by referencing my article, I’ll offer my interpretation. Notices he says “the language”. At the time, Fortran was the language for numerical/scientific computing. By 1982 it had evolved significantly from its origins 30 years earlier, but was still called Fortran. He is saying that it will continue to evolve, but no matter what it will look like in another 30 years, it will still be the language, and will still be called Fortran. He was prescient: Fortran 90 included radical advances to the language, but it remained, pretty much, the scientific programming language, and was still called Fortran. The last sentence of the article, which is from 2014, refers back to the epigram, and predicts that Julia may be the language that finally supplants Fortran for use in science and engineering. Now, Fortran is still dominant in high performance scientific computing, C++ has a niche in particle physics, but Julia is, in fact, making rapid headway across a wide variety of disciplines. So I think my prediction is turning out to be pretty good.