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

Re:the point of higher lvl languages

[Dan Ost]

You're exactly right. People who think that there should be standardization
of 4th generation languages are missing the point. 3rd generation languages
are general purpose. 4th generation languages are designed with specific
problem areas in mind and so adopt syntax and paradigms that are convenient
to that problem space.

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"

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?

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).

Generations of Language

[jd]

Computer languages are broken down in Computer Science to five generations and three flavours, which have nothing to do with how they are used, or even how they are implemented, but rather the level of complexity required to actually use the language.

• First Generation: Trivial Machine Code. (Processors capable of running Java, etc, natively run "non-trivial" machine code.)
  
• Second Generation: Assembly Language. This is the first generation in which actual compilation is required.
  
• Third Generation: Procedural Language. Support for basic code and data structures, but no encapsulation of combined code/data.
  
• Fourth Generation: Abstract Language. You tell the computer WHAT to do, not how to do it, allowing the computer to work out what is best, rather than having a rigid, pre-built solution. Some level of encapsulation is implicit.
  
• Fifth Generation: Intelligent Language. You describe the problem and let the computer derive the most implementable specification from that description. In theory, this maximises reuse, portability AND performance. In practice, nobody ever did get it right.
  

• Functional Design: Code and data are seperate. This allows for multiple bits of code to scan the same data very efficiently, but it also means that you can't guarantee that the code will understand the data correctly. C is Functional and anyone who has used pipes in DOS or Unix is familiar with the idea of rapid scanning.
  
• Object-Oriented Design: Code and data are linked, such that code can only operate on data it can provably process and is provably present and set to a valid state. Smalltalk is really the closest to a "pure" OO system out there.
  
• Object-Based Design: Any hybrid, in which data can be encapulated with code, but this is not a requirement. C++ is Opbject-Based, as is Java.
  

Anybody can embed anything in anything, if they really want. That is not a criteria for anything. For example, C will support embedded assembly, but neither C nor assembly are fourth-generation.