Chris Rowley writes:
 > Even more eternally, it is the unique public de facto archival and
 > communication language for research activity in a range of disciplines
 > around mathematics ... and in this sense it is growing in importance
 > even now.

gracious. the signs are all around us, I see it now.

 > But this has very little to do with TeX the program or LaTeX as it is
 > being discussed here.

except that I question what this is all for. we have (in my view), five
things kicking around

 1 TeX the typesetting engine
 2 TeX the typesetting markup language
 3 TeX the archival-files-which-must-format-identically
 4 (La)TeX the style design language
 5 LaTeX the authoring language

which is the important bit? which is the "unique public de facto
archival and communication language", exactly?

sebastian