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> To my mind, this is why we need a general purpose language: adapt usage to libraries so that this can be more easily done.

Can't be done.

People like to treat programming languages as a tool, but they are a substrate, a material you use to build. The material you work with shapes what you build. People use balsa for prototypes in wind tunnels, they use glass or clay or plastic or steel or iron or copper or stone or concrete. Someone comes along and says "We're going to only build things out of steel so that people only need to learn steelworking" and not one industrial designer or civil engineer or mechanical engineer or consumer electronics company is going to like this idea. Technically, anything you can make with balsa is possible to make with steel too, but that's stupid. (In the mean time, condom manufacturers are hoping that someone stops you before you get to their product.)

But the best thing to do when someone is insistent that an impossible thing is possible, though, is to suggest that they try it and see what they come up with. The best you can do is a Turing Tarpit (in which everything is possible but nothing is convenient).

> whatever is left of big iron.

Hollowed-out mountains: https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2023/11/ . Just somewhat difficult to get time on those machines.

But you've got to be able to handle massively parallel Von Neumann systems with petabytes of storage and Harvard architecture specks with a little ROM you burn in and a few hundred bytes of working memory and no persistent storage.

Arthur Whitney writes these insane k systems and it runs on $current_year CPUs but to eliminate contention on the memory bus, it runs with only one core enabled, and these are the microsecond trading bots.

Meanwhile, Chuck Moore builds these 144-core unclocked CPUs that outperform FPGAs but are programmed somewhat more conventionally, using colorForth, and he can do real-time h264 encoding with only 4 of those cores, each of them running only a handful of instructions.

But you've also got FPGAs and those are specified in their own programming language, Verilog, and you're not going to be able to describe that kind of thing as conveniently in another language that, of necessity, will have different semantics.