I suspect that languages like Prolog do not fit into the mould of today’s business hierarchies. However languages like Prolog have a future — they will still be here when today’s business management models have been abandoned and replaced.

It is said that Ken Thompson, the inventor of Unix, wrote the first version of Unix in assembly language in 1969. He begain to rewrite it in Fortran IV but gave up after a day or a week, and used C which was derived from Martin Richards’ language B, derived from BCPL. (B is still available (2007) free as a download from Richards at Oxford or Cambridge). As far as is known, no one has yet implemented Unix in Fortran (or Java).
Fortran was fairly portable. However, different computers had different word sizes, so it was easy to write Fortran code that was not very portable. Waite’s SIMC and STAGE2 systems were “portable” (though they took about a week’s work, by an expert, to get them to run on a new computer). Unix is much more portable than this. Today we expect “portable” to mean that a program will run correctly with absolutely no changes, and completely automatically.

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