Where Should all the 4th Gens Go?

ARSDeveloperGuy writes "Fourth generation languages are cool, but there seems to be little to no effort being spent to standardize them. The current state is commercialized pseudo-languages are created to allow vertical apps to be expanded. (ARS Remedy, Siebel, Oracle JDeveloper) The concepts of a form, field, and workflow can be standardized, and when you look at many of these languages they aren't terribly different. Why don't we create a standard and start writing "workflow converters" for these powerful languages? That would allow conversions to happen more readily, maybe even to an open source offering like OpenSourceCRM."

Comments

the point of higher lvl languages

[telecsan]

Isn't part of the point of the 4th & higher gen languages that they are customized to a specific application. TFA gives MATLAB and Mathcad as examples. I don't think a 'generic' 4th lvl language would be helpful or even possible.

Re:the point of higher lvl languages

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm. Lisp philosophy: Lisp is a language for writing languages. A good lisp program extends the lisp language vocabulary in an application-specific way.

The "standardisation" of 4th gen languages is indeed futile, as they are by definition domain-specific. What you can standardise howevert is the best way to integrate a bunch of domain-specific languages together. Then you get Lisp: around since 60s, and constantly evolving to the present day.

Or, given the amount of NIH the computing world displays, we'll probably see some misbegotten lisp clone only with perverse XML instead of straightforward sexp syntax. And it will be hailed as a Great New Thing, similar to the way compsci researchers get funding for AI/KR by rehashing in XML+Java/C# the oodles of toy 20-year-old programs written in Lisp before the AI Winter.

Re:the point of higher lvl languages

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it'll be a lisp that supports lightweight processes, unicode, and has a compatible windows port that costs less than $10,000 per seat.

Oh hey, hello MzScheme.

Lisp is hardly one to talk about NIH. Their philosophy is "everything was invented in Lisp first, so actually implementing and releasing whatever you're talking about is left for plebians who don't understand the elegance of lisp"

Benefits?

[Umbral Blot]

I don't see the advantages to standardizing these languages. One of the things that makes them useful is that they are designed to perform a smallish set of tasks efficiently and with little effort for the programmer. Standardizing them seems like it would move them all away from their problem domains making them less useful.

MathML

[pfafrich]

Most posts here seem to be down on this idea. In the maths world at least there does seem to be quite a push for interoperability of the many maths 4GL's Mathematica, Maple, Matlab. Theres a thing called MathML which is specifically designed so that there is some common way that these different platforms can communicate. In theory you can write some code in Mathematica, convert it to MathML, send it to a colegue using Maple and they can convert it to Maple code and run it.

Maybe mathematics is a special domain in the the 4GL's we are seeing are really trying to represent the same 7GL (i.e. maths notation), so the problem is intrinsically easy.

I'm getting kind of worried by the conservatism of the Slashdot crew. Any new idea coming along (database yesterday, 4GL's today) seems to get shot down. Are we going to actually see new ideas coming from the opensource movement, or is it just going to be limited to reimplementing existing programs?

Re:MathML

[jbolden]

Maple and Mathematica are math languages in which you have a bunch of products which do almost exactly the same thing being used by people doing almost exactly the same thing. This is one of the best possible cases. Now consider say TeX and Mathematica. Those are 4GLs, the common syntax would end up looking a great deal like scientific word for windows. But Mathematica and Maple use lazy evaluation throw in say Mathcad which uses soon as possible evaluation and you quickly see you wouldn't want to run the same code everywhere. That is, even where it is easy to do it may not be useful.

Lets branch a little further. TeX assumes you know a lot about the subject matter but not a lot about typesetting which is very unusual for design languages. Things like compuset assume the opposite; that is the information is simple but the user knows all about fonts, kerning, layout, paper stocks.... How are we going to combine those two totally opposite user emphasis? Oh and another importat difference compuset is usually designed to run in batch mode, TeX is usually designed for one of a kind documents. So we want different kinds of error messages (compuset: record 23454 violates parameter ARDS, record skipped, vs. TeX page 14 macro ARDS does not accept floating point numbers [c]ontinue [e]dit....?

This idea got shot down because its a bad idea. Most ideas are bad ideas and thus most ideas are going to get shot down. That's not a bad thing. The cheapest place to kill a bad idea is in the "I have an idea" stage before any labor gets spent on it. The good ideas are not generally the grand schemes but very specialized one off solution that just seems to work for related things and then things related to that and then a pretty broad range of problems.... The ones invented this year are unlikely to be noticed by the broad community for 5 years or more.

The Whole Concept of 4GL is bogus

[fm6]

"Fourth Generation Language" is one of the those silly concepts that never caught on, but still survives, woefully distorted. The idea was that writing software by encoding procedures and algorithms was obsolete ("third generation language"), and needed to be replaced by languages that used more advanced paradigms.

The so-called 3GLs didn't get replaced by the so-called 4GLs, because the latter aren't superior languages in every respect -- they just do some things better. The most conspicuous area where 4GLs excel is database access. As a result, many people think 4GL means "database language", and apply it to 3GL languages like Delphi and Visual Basic that are widely used in database apps.

I guess the term "4GL" will be around forever, but it really isn't very useful. If you want to categorize languages in a meaningful way, use terms that describe how they actually work, like "imperative" (3GL, more or less) and "functional" (4GL, ditto).

C is NOT functional

[csirac]

Admittedly, I'm an EE and not a Software person, but I've been working a lot with FPGA design and this involves the use of a few "functional" programming languages such as the Scheme-like confluence Hardware Description Language (HDL).

ANSI and ISO C are imperative, sequential, PROCEDURAL languages.

From my (possibly wrong) understanding, languages such as Haskell (Wikipedia) and Scheme (Wikipedia) are "functional".

These are so far from anything at all like C programming, Haskell in particular for some reason reminds me of that movie Event Horizon, but that's probably just my warped mind thinking irrelevant thoughts again...

I'm told that the Haskell course taught at my University is a source of great frustration to many programmer wannabes who can never get their head around the "functional" programming paradigm and are forever stuck in their Java ways.

So, if C is classed as "functional" in your books, what would Haskell be?