#4gl — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #4gl, aggregated by home.social.
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@SURF ik zou Wang PACE wel in een container willen hebben draaien. Was toen (eind jaren 80, begin 90) een waanzinnig productieve omgeving om applicaties in te bouwen. Helaas zo gesloten ala wat, dus toen internet kwam was het over.
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James Martin's 1981 book Application Development Without Programmers describes fourth-generation programming languages, giving as an example the Engineer's Problem: "give 6% raises to engineers whose job ratings had an average of 7 or better." It took Martin 12 pages of COBOL or a page and a half of Informatics Mark IV. This untested sketch in SQL, probably the most widespread 4GL, took me 10 lines. Perhaps the most astonishing part is SQL's "left join self where newer is null" idiom to find the newest salary history entry.
select s.userid, s.salary, s.date as salary_date,
average(r.rating) as avg_rating,
s.salary * 1.06 as proposed_salary
from employee_rating r
inner join employee_salary s on s.userid = r.userid
left join employee_salary s_newer
on s_newer.userid = s.userid and s_newer.changeid > s.changeid
where s_newer.changeid is null
and r.date > current_timestamp - interval 360 day
group by s.userid having average(r.rating) > 7 -
Mostly, software development happens in so-called 3rd generation languages (#3GL) which include everything from C to Python. An example of a #4GL is SQL which, undeniably, operates at a higher level of abstraction. There are other "4GL" branded enterprisey languages from the likes of IBM and similar corps that look suspiciously like 3GLs and compile to various 3GLs (mainly Java). There is some relation between the idea of a 4GL and the ideas of a #DSL or #LowCode solution. #VHLL #Programming
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e543 — Rent-a-Anything
e543 with Andy, Michael and Michael - #AgenticAI and the changing nature of work, #agents #RentingHumans, #RealTimeTranslation, artistic #roads, #e-bikes for your feet and a whole lot more. -
@jasongorman The coding part of programming is generally the easiest part of the work, and agreeing on the problem to be solved and what good looks like the hardest.
I started out programming at the microcode and machine code level. Ever since it has just been further and further abstraction. I don't think the next stage will be that different.
I remember the hype around 4GL and the imminent demise of programmers. Didn't happen then and it will not happen this time. Programmers will just evolve and mover higher up the stack again.
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I remember writing business applications in 4GLs back in the 1980s. 4GLs (forth generation languages) were going to change programming, just like LLMs (Large Language Models) are supposed to now.
I used Sculptor and Zim and they were great, but it still took programming and business nous and data modelling to build an application that worked and could be maintained.
Nicely wrapped up here by @eschaton: The “Promise” of “Easier” Programming
