Far removed from the needs of scientific modeling, yes?
Yes, that is the key factor of why we are in this fix. Systems programmers are the ones who develop computer languages. Their worldview is what governs the languages we get. Unfortunately, they have always been driven toward obscure twists (e.g. pointers) that sacrifice simplicity of programming for computation efficiency, a holdover practice motivated when computers were expensive and manpower was cheap, which ended in about 1965. As a result, when we adopt systems programming methods in mainstream programming, we are spending labor dollars to save computer pennies in every line of code. In essence, this is the root of the so called IT productivity paradox. We took a major turn in this direction when higher metaphoric simulation languages like Simula gave rise to the study of operating systems with concurrent processes, and a particle flow theory of programmable data objects within a computing system arose.
