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

[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.

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?