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Article starts mentioning 4GL's - a term I have not heard in a long, long time. COBOL's promise was that it was human-like text, so we wouldn't need programmer

Article starts mentioning 4GL's - a term I have not heard in a long, long time. COBOL's promise was that it was human-like text, so we wouldn't need programmers anymore. A lot like "low code" platforms, and now LLM generated code. The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. When you get down to breaking down that problem... you become a programmer. The main lesson of COBOL is that it isn't the computer interface/language that necessitates a programmer.

_yb2s 2y ago
> we wouldn't need programmers anymore This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper, and have it work - something few people can or need to do nowadays
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago
  > This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. I have heard others and myself describe COBOL in many ways, most involving creative expletive phraseology which would make a sailor blush, but "low level/terse language" is a new one to me. > But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper ... LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    > LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC. Correct. Fortran, LISP, and COBOL were invented in ‘57, ‘58, and ‘59, respectively.
    - moomin 2y ago
      Yes, but the ideas behind COBOL were older still. Flowmatic, COBOL’s predecessor, dates back to 1955, so it really just depends how you count.
    - jll29 2y ago
      > Yes, but the ideas behind COBOL were older still. Flowmatic, COBOL’s predecessor, dates back to 1955, so it really just depends how you count. Yes. but the ideas behind LISP were older still: Church's typed lambda calulus was conceived in 1936.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    > LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC I didn't mean to imply COBOL was anything close to the first programming language, only that I was speculating what 'programming' generally meant within computer culture at the time. I was not around at that time- but I strongly suspect that directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s, whereas it is far less common nowadays. I wonder what year Fortran overtook assembly and became the most popular programming language during that era? I suspect it was well after COBOL came out. Surely there is a lag time for any new programming language to become commonplace. I couldn't find any data on that, but I was able to find that C was released in 1972, but took until 1982 to overtake Fortran, and until 1985 to overtake Pascal. I often forget how slow new things propagated through the culture in pre-internet times.
    - AdieuToLogic 2y ago
      > ... I strongly suspect that directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s ... It depends on what type of programming was being done. What we now call "kernels" and "device drivers" were largely authored in assembly languages well into the 80's (depending on the machine). > I wonder what year Fortran overtook assembly and became the most popular programming language during that era? Fortran got its name from "formula translator" (or equivalent, depending the source), so it quickly gained traction in the scientific/mathematics domain. As an aside, there are variants of BASIC which have much of the semantic mathematical capabilities of Fortran yet with better I/O support IMHO. None come close in performance AFAIK. > I suspect it was well after COBOL came out. COBOL took off in the business world, as it was intended to do, and remains prevalent in at least the insurance and banking industries to this day. > ... I was able to find that C was released in 1972, but took until 1982 to overtake Fortran, and until 1985 to overtake Pascal. K&R C was viewed by many as "portable assembly code", with Unix helping it to gain acceptance. ANSII C largely replaced use of K&R C in the late 80's. Depending on the OS, a small amount of "shim code" remained in assembly (such as interrupt handlers and MMU interaction) up to most of the OS being written in assembly well into the late 80's. This is all to say that: > ... directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s Is still common practice in OS development, albeit to a lesser degree, if directly writing machine code is omitted. HTH
- electroly 2y ago
  Do you mean something other than "terse" here? Or are you perhaps thinking of a different language? I cannot possibly imagine that adjective being used to describe COBOL. It is the #1 textbook example of a verbose language--the opposite of terse.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    What I mean is that it is an attempt to make a high level domain specific language, but is not my modern standards
- thorin 2y ago
  Saying we don't need "programmers" any more was true when a programmer was someone who used very low level languages such as Assembly and probably had used punched cards in the past etc. Languages like cobol / fortran / plsql gave analysts a chance of designing things on paper and handing off to developers or even doing the development themselves which couldn't have happened in the past. Using something like python these days feels like the kind of thing that would have been thought of as a 4gl in those days for some use cases. However, python also works as a general purpose programming language.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    That was exactly my point
actionfromafar 2y ago
Vision 4GL. Like VB but cross platform and with a horribly unstable IDE which would corrupt the source code. (Which was in some kind of binary format not amenable to source control.)
AdieuToLogic 2y ago
> COBOL's promise was that it was human-like text, so we wouldn't need programmers anymore. A lot like "low code" platforms, and now LLM generated code. The more things change, the more they are the same.
wvenable 2y ago
My company is finally upgrading away from a product that is written in a 4GL language. This product probably started out on a Unix but was ported to Windows decades ago. It has both a web and classic VB front ends. All the source code is available and theoretically I could make changes and compile it up. The language itself is basically just plain procedural code but with SQL mixed right in -- somewhat like DBase or Foxpro but worse. I think the compiler produces C code and is then compiled with C compiler but it's been a while since I looked into it. Requires a version of Kornshell for Windows as well.
bloppe 2y ago
Even LLMs have not realized the dream of a natural language computer interface. Everyone who uses them significantly has to read up on prompt engineering and add little things like "explain your steps" or "describe it like I'm 5" or other oddly specific sequences of characters to get the results they want. That's not natural language. It's a DSL.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Worse. It’s a DSL without a formal specification. You are writing prompts blindly in hopes they trigger the desired behaviour from the LLM. A bit like writing enchantments to force demons to do your bidding.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    >A bit like writing enchantments to force demons to do your bidding. But without the cool chanting and poetic language; just like cyberpunk was realized without the vivid imagery and neon lights :(
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      > just like cyberpunk was realized without the vivid imagery and neon lights :( The 21st century never ceases to disappoint. It’s a cheap, low budget and dystopian version of what we imagined.
      - NoGravitas 2y ago
        To be fair, what we imagined was dystopian, too. It's just that some people with a lot of ambition and not much media literacy didn't realize it was dystopian, and set about to build that future.
        zknow 2y ago
        could have been high budget dystopian at least!
unscaled 2y ago
4GL were supposed to be even more of that, with more "human-language-like" constructs added to the language to deal with things besides general logic, simple data structures and arithmetic. The author mentions "4GLs" were all the rage in the early 1990s, but I doubt that that was true outside of the mainframe world. The 4GL movement, as a conscious movement, seems to have always been highly mainframe oriented (the Wikipedia article mentions reducing the amount of punched cards necessary for a program as initial goals). By the 1990s you could categorize many languages as 4GL, but I doubt this term was used with any enthusiasm outside of the mainframe world. It was the opposite of a buzzword. 1992 wasn't too long ago. Linus Torvalds has already released Linux, and Guido van Rossum was already working on Python. Perl was already gaining popularity, and Haskell also saw it first versions released. The forefront of technology was already shifting from expensive workstations to consumer-grade PCs and language designers gave little thought to 4GL concepts, even when they happened to design something that could qualify as a 4GL for personal computers (e.g. dBase, HyperTalk, AppleScript). I agree that human-like text is a bad idea for most use cases of programming, but I think this is not why the 4GL movement failed, and in fact most 4GLs weren't more "natural language-like" than the 3GL COBOL. I think the main problem was that the 4GL movement has never really defined a new generation or anything useful at all. The previously defined generations of language introduced revolutionary changes: translation from friendlier assembly language to machine code (2GL) and compilation (3GL). The only change we can properly define from the loose definition of 4GL is "put more features that used to be external routines or library directly into the language". This approach worked out relatively well when the language was domain-specific. This is how we got some of the most successful 4GLs like SQL, R and MATLAB. These languages have syntax that deals directly with data tables, statistics and linear algebra directly into the language and became very useful in their own niche. The concept of a general-purpose 4GL, on the other hand, was always destined to boil down to an overly bloated language.
- int_19h 2y ago
  dBase and its numerous descendants and competitors (FoxPro, Clipper etc) were extremely popular for line-of-business desktop applications in the 90s. And, yes, they are indeed traditionally categorized as 4GLs - and, given how nebulous the definition always has been anyway, I think that "traditionally categorized" is the most practical definition that you can use here. But, yes, I agree that aside from the generally more verbose and sometimes unwieldy syntax, there wasn't really that much to it in practice. I did work with FoxPro, and the reason why it was popular was not because you had to write things like "ACTIVATE WINDOW", but because it had many things baked directly into the language that nicely covered all the common tasks a pre-SQL data-centric app would need - e.g. a loop that could iterate directly over a table.
froh 2y ago
> The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. I intuit this also is an intrinsic limit to LLM based approaches to "you don't need them expensive programmers no more" with LLMs magically "generating the solution" you move the responsibility for concise expression of the problem up the ladder. and then you "program" in prompts, reviewing the LLM-proposed formalization ("code"). I other words, the nature of "programming" changes to prompt engineering. alas you still have to understand formal languages (code)... so there'll always be plenty to do for humans who can "math" :-)
- jasfi 2y ago
  A lot of business people want to get something functional that they can sell, and hire a programmer if/when they can afford one. That niche is seeing a lot of uptake with regards to LLM based approaches. This works for them because an MVP typically isn't a lot of code for what they need, and LLMs have a limited scope within which they can generate something that works.
- devjab 2y ago
  This is only true to an extend. We have a lot of digitally inclined workers who’re developing programs or scripts to handle a lot of things for them. It’s imperfect and often wildly insecure and inefficient, but unlike any previous no-code or “standard” solution it actually works. Often in conjunction with “standard” solutions. On one hand you’re correct in that there will always be a need for programmers. I really doubt there will be a great need for generalist programmers though. The one area that may survive is the people who’re capable of transforming business needs and rules into code. Which requires a social and analytical skillset for cooperating with non tech people. You’ll also see a demand for skilled programmers at scale and for embedded programming, but the giant work force of generalist developers (and probably web developers once Figma and similar lets designers generate better code) is likely going to become much smaller in the coming decades. Then is basically what the entire office workforce is facing. AI believers have been saying AI would do to the office what robots did to the assembly line for years, but now it actually seems like they’re going to be correct.
vishnugupta 2y ago
I agree with you by and large except for this part. > COBOL's promise was ... we wouldn't need programmers anymore..average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem COBOL wasn't intended to be used by an "average" person but rather those with deep domain knowledge. They would know the business processes so well that they could transcribe it in COBOL with little or no need to learn how the computers worked. In some ways similar to analysts/data folks using SQL to communicate with databases. While at it let me share a few more aspects of the top of my head. COBOL and 4GLs in general were primarily intended to be used to build business applications; payroll, banking, HRMS, inventory management and so on. Even within that emphasis was more towards batch processing operations to reduce the burden on people doing routine bulk operations like reconciliation. COBOL harks back to the times when there was no dedicated DBMS software. Which is why you see so much focus on how files are organised and the extensive verbs around files which somewhat resemble SQL today.
- tannhaeuser 2y ago
  > COBOL and 4GLs in general COBOL dates back to 1959, much earlier than 4GLs, and the cited 1992/1999 articles make the point that 4GLs were poised to replace the likes of COBOL and FORTRAN when in fact those dinosaurs, or rather nautili since still living, turned out to outlive 4GLs except SQL (when counted as 4GL).
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    Informix 4GL is still alive and well (somewhat, anyway): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Informix-4GL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Informix-4GL.
  - antonvs 2y ago
    Arguably, Python is what 4GLs turned into or were supplanted by.
- moomin 2y ago
  In my experience, often it’s hard to find that person with deep domain knowledge, and even when they do, it’s unstructured, they take things for granted they shouldn’t* and the have no appreciation of the demands of formalism. Getting anything you can use to construct a work plan, never mind a detailed feature list, out of clients can be a dark art. *To the point I have repeatedly experienced a point close to the end of the project where they go “What do you mean you don’t handle a case I have failed to mention for the entire duration of the project?”
agumonkey 2y ago
I spent very little time in the cobol world but what I got is that its use outgrew many times its original design (batch processing not too complex tables/rows). Whenever you start to need complicated state machines and abstractions the language will implode.
systems_glitch 2y ago
This is often the exact reason I give to people when they don't understand why Amy and I don't think "everyone should be a 'coder!'" should be pushed in schools, heh. When you're graduating students from high school who go into college as engineering hopefuls who can't solve X - 2 = 0 for X, what hopes does the average individual have for solving programming problems?
cwbriscoe 2y ago
4GL's were a mistake. We have 4gl code that was compiled into COBOL. Nice. Except, nobody still around knows the 4gl language and the generated COBOL is completely unreadable.

_yb2s 2y ago

> we wouldn't need programmers anymore This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper, and have it work - something few people can or need to do nowadays

AdieuToLogic 2y ago
> This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. I have heard others and myself describe COBOL in many ways, most involving creative expletive phraseology which would make a sailor blush, but "low level/terse language" is a new one to me. > But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper ... LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC. Correct. Fortran, LISP, and COBOL were invented in ‘57, ‘58, and ‘59, respectively.
  - moomin 2y ago
    Yes, but the ideas behind COBOL were older still. Flowmatic, COBOL’s predecessor, dates back to 1955, so it really just depends how you count.
  - jll29 2y ago
    > Yes, but the ideas behind COBOL were older still. Flowmatic, COBOL’s predecessor, dates back to 1955, so it really just depends how you count. Yes. but the ideas behind LISP were older still: Church's typed lambda calulus was conceived in 1936.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  > LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC I didn't mean to imply COBOL was anything close to the first programming language, only that I was speculating what 'programming' generally meant within computer culture at the time. I was not around at that time- but I strongly suspect that directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s, whereas it is far less common nowadays. I wonder what year Fortran overtook assembly and became the most popular programming language during that era? I suspect it was well after COBOL came out. Surely there is a lag time for any new programming language to become commonplace. I couldn't find any data on that, but I was able to find that C was released in 1972, but took until 1982 to overtake Fortran, and until 1985 to overtake Pascal. I often forget how slow new things propagated through the culture in pre-internet times.
  - AdieuToLogic 2y ago
    > ... I strongly suspect that directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s ... It depends on what type of programming was being done. What we now call "kernels" and "device drivers" were largely authored in assembly languages well into the 80's (depending on the machine). > I wonder what year Fortran overtook assembly and became the most popular programming language during that era? Fortran got its name from "formula translator" (or equivalent, depending the source), so it quickly gained traction in the scientific/mathematics domain. As an aside, there are variants of BASIC which have much of the semantic mathematical capabilities of Fortran yet with better I/O support IMHO. None come close in performance AFAIK. > I suspect it was well after COBOL came out. COBOL took off in the business world, as it was intended to do, and remains prevalent in at least the insurance and banking industries to this day. > ... I was able to find that C was released in 1972, but took until 1982 to overtake Fortran, and until 1985 to overtake Pascal. K&R C was viewed by many as "portable assembly code", with Unix helping it to gain acceptance. ANSII C largely replaced use of K&R C in the late 80's. Depending on the OS, a small amount of "shim code" remained in assembly (such as interrupt handlers and MMU interaction) up to most of the OS being written in assembly well into the late 80's. This is all to say that: > ... directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s Is still common practice in OS development, albeit to a lesser degree, if directly writing machine code is omitted. HTH
electroly 2y ago
Do you mean something other than "terse" here? Or are you perhaps thinking of a different language? I cannot possibly imagine that adjective being used to describe COBOL. It is the #1 textbook example of a verbose language--the opposite of terse.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  What I mean is that it is an attempt to make a high level domain specific language, but is not my modern standards
thorin 2y ago
Saying we don't need "programmers" any more was true when a programmer was someone who used very low level languages such as Assembly and probably had used punched cards in the past etc. Languages like cobol / fortran / plsql gave analysts a chance of designing things on paper and handing off to developers or even doing the development themselves which couldn't have happened in the past. Using something like python these days feels like the kind of thing that would have been thought of as a 4gl in those days for some use cases. However, python also works as a general purpose programming language.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  That was exactly my point

actionfromafar 2y ago

Vision 4GL. Like VB but cross platform and with a horribly unstable IDE which would corrupt the source code. (Which was in some kind of binary format not amenable to source control.)

AdieuToLogic 2y ago

> COBOL's promise was that it was human-like text, so we wouldn't need programmers anymore. A lot like "low code" platforms, and now LLM generated code. The more things change, the more they are the same.

wvenable 2y ago

My company is finally upgrading away from a product that is written in a 4GL language. This product probably started out on a Unix but was ported to Windows decades ago. It has both a web and classic VB front ends. All the source code is available and theoretically I could make changes and compile it up. The language itself is basically just plain procedural code but with SQL mixed right in -- somewhat like DBase or Foxpro but worse. I think the compiler produces C code and is then compiled with C compiler but it's been a while since I looked into it. Requires a version of Kornshell for Windows as well.

bloppe 2y ago

Even LLMs have not realized the dream of a natural language computer interface. Everyone who uses them significantly has to read up on prompt engineering and add little things like "explain your steps" or "describe it like I'm 5" or other oddly specific sequences of characters to get the results they want. That's not natural language. It's a DSL.

rbanffy 2y ago
Worse. It’s a DSL without a formal specification. You are writing prompts blindly in hopes they trigger the desired behaviour from the LLM. A bit like writing enchantments to force demons to do your bidding.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  >A bit like writing enchantments to force demons to do your bidding. But without the cool chanting and poetic language; just like cyberpunk was realized without the vivid imagery and neon lights :(
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > just like cyberpunk was realized without the vivid imagery and neon lights :( The 21st century never ceases to disappoint. It’s a cheap, low budget and dystopian version of what we imagined.
    - NoGravitas 2y ago
      To be fair, what we imagined was dystopian, too. It's just that some people with a lot of ambition and not much media literacy didn't realize it was dystopian, and set about to build that future.
      - zknow 2y ago
        could have been high budget dystopian at least!

unscaled 2y ago

4GL were supposed to be even more of that, with more "human-language-like" constructs added to the language to deal with things besides general logic, simple data structures and arithmetic. The author mentions "4GLs" were all the rage in the early 1990s, but I doubt that that was true outside of the mainframe world. The 4GL movement, as a conscious movement, seems to have always been highly mainframe oriented (the Wikipedia article mentions reducing the amount of punched cards necessary for a program as initial goals). By the 1990s you could categorize many languages as 4GL, but I doubt this term was used with any enthusiasm outside of the mainframe world. It was the opposite of a buzzword. 1992 wasn't too long ago. Linus Torvalds has already released Linux, and Guido van Rossum was already working on Python. Perl was already gaining popularity, and Haskell also saw it first versions released. The forefront of technology was already shifting from expensive workstations to consumer-grade PCs and language designers gave little thought to 4GL concepts, even when they happened to design something that could qualify as a 4GL for personal computers (e.g. dBase, HyperTalk, AppleScript). I agree that human-like text is a bad idea for most use cases of programming, but I think this is not why the 4GL movement failed, and in fact most 4GLs weren't more "natural language-like" than the 3GL COBOL. I think the main problem was that the 4GL movement has never really defined a new generation or anything useful at all. The previously defined generations of language introduced revolutionary changes: translation from friendlier assembly language to machine code (2GL) and compilation (3GL). The only change we can properly define from the loose definition of 4GL is "put more features that used to be external routines or library directly into the language". This approach worked out relatively well when the language was domain-specific. This is how we got some of the most successful 4GLs like SQL, R and MATLAB. These languages have syntax that deals directly with data tables, statistics and linear algebra directly into the language and became very useful in their own niche. The concept of a general-purpose 4GL, on the other hand, was always destined to boil down to an overly bloated language.

int_19h 2y ago
dBase and its numerous descendants and competitors (FoxPro, Clipper etc) were extremely popular for line-of-business desktop applications in the 90s. And, yes, they are indeed traditionally categorized as 4GLs - and, given how nebulous the definition always has been anyway, I think that "traditionally categorized" is the most practical definition that you can use here. But, yes, I agree that aside from the generally more verbose and sometimes unwieldy syntax, there wasn't really that much to it in practice. I did work with FoxPro, and the reason why it was popular was not because you had to write things like "ACTIVATE WINDOW", but because it had many things baked directly into the language that nicely covered all the common tasks a pre-SQL data-centric app would need - e.g. a loop that could iterate directly over a table.

froh 2y ago

> The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. I intuit this also is an intrinsic limit to LLM based approaches to "you don't need them expensive programmers no more" with LLMs magically "generating the solution" you move the responsibility for concise expression of the problem up the ladder. and then you "program" in prompts, reviewing the LLM-proposed formalization ("code"). I other words, the nature of "programming" changes to prompt engineering. alas you still have to understand formal languages (code)... so there'll always be plenty to do for humans who can "math" :-)

jasfi 2y ago
A lot of business people want to get something functional that they can sell, and hire a programmer if/when they can afford one. That niche is seeing a lot of uptake with regards to LLM based approaches. This works for them because an MVP typically isn't a lot of code for what they need, and LLMs have a limited scope within which they can generate something that works.
devjab 2y ago
This is only true to an extend. We have a lot of digitally inclined workers who’re developing programs or scripts to handle a lot of things for them. It’s imperfect and often wildly insecure and inefficient, but unlike any previous no-code or “standard” solution it actually works. Often in conjunction with “standard” solutions. On one hand you’re correct in that there will always be a need for programmers. I really doubt there will be a great need for generalist programmers though. The one area that may survive is the people who’re capable of transforming business needs and rules into code. Which requires a social and analytical skillset for cooperating with non tech people. You’ll also see a demand for skilled programmers at scale and for embedded programming, but the giant work force of generalist developers (and probably web developers once Figma and similar lets designers generate better code) is likely going to become much smaller in the coming decades. Then is basically what the entire office workforce is facing. AI believers have been saying AI would do to the office what robots did to the assembly line for years, but now it actually seems like they’re going to be correct.

vishnugupta 2y ago

I agree with you by and large except for this part. > COBOL's promise was ... we wouldn't need programmers anymore..average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem COBOL wasn't intended to be used by an "average" person but rather those with deep domain knowledge. They would know the business processes so well that they could transcribe it in COBOL with little or no need to learn how the computers worked. In some ways similar to analysts/data folks using SQL to communicate with databases. While at it let me share a few more aspects of the top of my head. COBOL and 4GLs in general were primarily intended to be used to build business applications; payroll, banking, HRMS, inventory management and so on. Even within that emphasis was more towards batch processing operations to reduce the burden on people doing routine bulk operations like reconciliation. COBOL harks back to the times when there was no dedicated DBMS software. Which is why you see so much focus on how files are organised and the extensive verbs around files which somewhat resemble SQL today.

tannhaeuser 2y ago
> COBOL and 4GLs in general COBOL dates back to 1959, much earlier than 4GLs, and the cited 1992/1999 articles make the point that 4GLs were poised to replace the likes of COBOL and FORTRAN when in fact those dinosaurs, or rather nautili since still living, turned out to outlive 4GLs except SQL (when counted as 4GL).
- fuzztester 2y ago
  Informix 4GL is still alive and well (somewhat, anyway): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Informix-4GL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Informix-4GL.
- antonvs 2y ago
  Arguably, Python is what 4GLs turned into or were supplanted by.
moomin 2y ago
In my experience, often it’s hard to find that person with deep domain knowledge, and even when they do, it’s unstructured, they take things for granted they shouldn’t* and the have no appreciation of the demands of formalism. Getting anything you can use to construct a work plan, never mind a detailed feature list, out of clients can be a dark art. *To the point I have repeatedly experienced a point close to the end of the project where they go “What do you mean you don’t handle a case I have failed to mention for the entire duration of the project?”

agumonkey 2y ago

I spent very little time in the cobol world but what I got is that its use outgrew many times its original design (batch processing not too complex tables/rows). Whenever you start to need complicated state machines and abstractions the language will implode.

systems_glitch 2y ago

This is often the exact reason I give to people when they don't understand why Amy and I don't think "everyone should be a 'coder!'" should be pushed in schools, heh. When you're graduating students from high school who go into college as engineering hopefuls who can't solve X - 2 = 0 for X, what hopes does the average individual have for solving programming problems?

cwbriscoe 2y ago

4GL's were a mistake. We have 4gl code that was compiled into COBOL. Nice. Except, nobody still around knows the 4gl language and the generated COBOL is completely unreadable.