You are absolutely right. To be honest, the current situation is not too different from this hypothetical case. Fortran is used mostly to write numeric routines

You are absolutely right. To be honest, the current situation is not too different from this hypothetical case. Fortran is used mostly to write numeric routines and then we call them from a Python script, instead of writing text and arguments processing (for example) directly from Fortran. But I still find interesting thinking about where these languages would be if these limits had been consistently respected.