It seems like you're purposely misunderstanding the point of the article to fit your worldview. This is less about about the new hip things the kids want and more about running a business.
Do you know FORTRAN? Do you know any programmers who know FORTRAN? Do you know anyone who wants to learn FORTRAN? Unless you're in the community the answer to all of those is no. And I can't imagine it's a big or growing community. The obvious consequence of this is FORTRAN will become more and more expensive to run a business on as time goes by because fewer and fewer people will have experience with it or any desire to use it. It's going to be harder to find people to port it and even harder to find people to maintain it.
As to it becoming "more and more expensive to run it", that kind of depends. Most of that Fortran code isn't touched very often. The cost of swapping it out is huge.
Swapping it out piecemeal isn't as expensive money-wise, but it carries large risk. Should it be ported out? Sure. Can it be, in any reasonable way? That's a harder question, and it's not as cut-and-dry as you make it sound.
> Unless you're in the community the answer to all of those is no.
Fortran is still widely used in mathematics and science. So if that's the community bubble you're referring to, then yes, there's definitely a niche there in my experience (but not purely for legacy reasons).
I've got a couple of friends who work at pretty big SAS shops. Non of them knew SAS before being hired. Their employers didn't care about their (lack of) SAS skills and no SAS questions where asked at the interview. They simply hired them and sent them on a couple of 3-4 day SAS training courses and expected them to pick it up.
Are they statisticians by any chance? Their domain knowledge would be much more important than programming experience. Conversely, for a programmer experienced in a classical PL (FORTRAN, LISP, C, Java), SAS is quite a shock. Data-oriented computation models (like SAS has) are not so common any more.
Not really I write a lot of SAS (Engineer at an Industrial plant) it is what we use to query all our production databases and to write Reports for operators.
If you know SQL or anything about databases SAS is very easy to pick up. My background from University was Java and C I had few difficulties.
My House-mate is a statistician he works in finance and uses R my understanding is R is a bit more difficult as it doesn't have anything like SAS's Proc SQL never used it myself though.
Coincidently Fortran is used very heavily in models here as well.
There are idiomatic ways to use every language. Much in the same way that you can write C++ that looks a lot like C, you can write FORTRAN that looks almost exactly like C. So if you have a lot of FORTRAN and thousands of C programmers, it isn't a huge problem. If your codebase was in COBOL, maybe you'd have a problem...
It's a pretty great thing viewed through another lens, you hire kids and teach them FORTRAN. They won't jump ship as easily when their work experience is all FORTRAN.
Do you know FORTRAN? Do you know any programmers who know FORTRAN? Do you know anyone who wants to learn FORTRAN? Unless you're in the community the answer to all of those is no. And I can't imagine it's a big or growing community. The obvious consequence of this is FORTRAN will become more and more expensive to run a business on as time goes by because fewer and fewer people will have experience with it or any desire to use it. It's going to be harder to find people to port it and even harder to find people to maintain it.
That's why it's a problem.