Talk:Fourth-generation programming language/Archives/2015

PL/SQL is not a 4GL

PL/SQL is a *procedural* language which borrows most of its syntax from Ada (and similar languages like Pascal and Modula-2). Wikipedia itself says so .

I propose we remove PL/SQL from this list.

Colin 't Hart (talk) 15:00, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

References

Rewrite the initial section and provide better examples

Rewrite the initial section and provide better examples

I would like to rewrite the initial section to be more accurate. Although some 4GLs did not meet expectations, others greatly surpassed 4GL objectives. The one example cited states an 8 fold performance improvement. Our projects achieved a consistent 10 fold performance improvement.

In addition, large scale high expose applications were build in 4GL languages. To my knowledge, the world's first all 4GL (no COBOL or any other language) large-scale application was developed in 1986 (An application all of you know and have used) and revolutionized application development. Variations of that same team went on to develop other highly successful applications which would rival virtually any application since in terms of development timeframes, robustness of the application, and ease of operations.

For reasons I have never understood, 4GLs have received little recognition despite being one of the greatest technology gains in the past 40 years.

Tonyboston (talk) 18:49, 22 January 2014 (UTC) AJ

I've been WP:BOLD and rewrote the lede as requested, also to address the issues listed atop the article. I didn't salvage much from the previous, as I found all lede paragraphs but the last questionable and with cite-needed. I preserved the one cite, but don't have any new ones to add; instead, I just borrowed from the rest of the page, which is what the lede is supposed to do anyway. But I did have to get "creative" with some of this; some more attention will be needed.

Please review my rewrite of the lede, comment here, or just improve as you see fit. And there's always WP:BRD if needed.

(To answer Tony's question above on lack of recognition, it seems 4GL has more or less become a meaningless term. I think 4GL got over-hyped and misused by people promoting their "new" 3GLs as 4GLs, plus some "pure" 4GLs were published before they were ready to compete with established general-purpose 3GLs, and were seen as failures (even though most computer languages have failed). Most 4GL ideas can now be found in 3GLs.) --A D Monroe III (talk) 16:30, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

After nearly a year without further comment or notable edits of my rewrite, I'm removing the unclear and technical tags. --A D Monroe III (talk) 15:25, 1 July 2015 (UTC)