>>>Well give the devil its due ... that web proggie works far better than a lot of their Java web apps...which are on the whole a disaster.
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>>I once got a task to develop some data crunching which would be based on sales sheets downloaded from, of all places, Walmart. While trying to automate the download (which later turned to be unnecessary, the mechanical Turk got the task to click the buttons and download the sheets, or some other way was found), I was looking around the pages from which these sheets were generated. Of course, I looked into the page source, and voila... it said something like "...from the Fortran data..." (or was it Cobol? nope, I think Fortran). All the fancy shmancy web coding was done in some new tool de zhoor :), but the background data crunching was still in the same old.
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>>Well, look at us. I'm working in the same language for 25 years now. How many other languages have the same mileage? Cobol, Fortran, ...?
>
>RPG predates VFP by at least 10 years and was alive and well the last time I looked.

That's the one I couldn't remember. It was actually done on some machine in my street, but I never had the honor of actually seeing it done.

>BASIC - an offshoot of FORTRAN - is still around in one form or another.

Basic was never a solid language, it was more an amorphous confederation of languages, sharing some (don't execute the pun, pardon it!) basic features. Take two dialects of it, even those that were made to run on the same machine (non-PC, too) and the chances are that the code from one can't be run from the other. In some cases, can't even be read.