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Jason Stamper's Blog
On 4GLs and why ‘Web 2.0’ is a step back in time
January 23, 2007
You may or may not have seen a little piece I did for our news desk on Progress Software’s SVP for corporate development and strategy, who told me that he believes that fourth generation languages (4GLs) -- or something very like them -- may be due for a comeback.
"If you look at what salesforce.com has been doing recently with a high productivity development environment and database that you don't need to know much about, that's a lot like a 4GL,” Progress’ Jeff Stamen told me. “Likewise, plenty of companies are saying that they do not want to do all their programming in such low-level languages as Java."
Stamen knows his stuff. He began his career as a database developer, leading a joint MIT Harvard project where he developed an entity-relationship database for query and analysis. After that he joined Mitrol, where he headed the development of the MIMS 4GL, an antecedent of the Progress 4GL....
... "When you are doing business process management and you want a new service, what you want is a nice higher-level language, not Java," Stamen told me. "Not just little add-ons, but something with 2,000 applications partners, something that we know you can build an entire ERP system in if you want, because we know Epicor and QAD have done exactly that."
Stamen pointed to the company's own 4GL, OpenEdge. He said that while it is true that higher revenue comes from other areas of the Progress business, like its Sonic ESB enterprise service bus, he believes there is still opportunity for growth from its older application development environment OpenEdge.
OpenEdge may be on version 10.1B, but the company insists that it still provides the capability to "implement reliable, high performance business applications quickly and with confidence."
Stamen’s views may not be as off the wall as they might at first sound. It’s long been noted that enterprise IT has a curious habit of coming full circle. One of the best examples of that was the move from mainframes with their dumb terminals to distributed computing, only for everyone to realise that a new kind of fairly dumb terminal called a thin client attached to a powerful server was actually not such a bad architecture after all.
Anyway, my ComputerWire colleague Tony Baer has also just blogged some interesting thoughts on the venerable 4GL, in his case looking at how the latest iteration of Ajax development tools – about as ‘Web 2.0’ as one can get – bear an uncanny resemblance to 4GLs. If he is right as he surely is, then just as many of us suspected, Web 2.0 is indeed another case of IT history repeating itself.
My original news piece covering Stamen’s views on 4GLs is here. Tony’s piece on Ajax and 4GLs is here. More on Progress’ 4GL here.
Comments
Some people say nothing is new, only repackaged, what goes around comes around again and again. It seems to me the freedom that Web 2.0 and business 2.0 offer in terms of creating, syndicating,and integrating content and functionality are more about open standards and api's we society can all agree on, the ability of technology companies to ride the waves of fashion and style and deliver their products latest releases with compliance, compatibility, interoperability, conversion,and any other variation on transmutation you care to name are still heading in ever decreasing circles.
My vision and that of many others is that we rise above the notion of complex programatic languages through a layer of articulation that takes its meaning from the real world most of humanity occupies. This will be the true empowerment for society when people no longer need to do more than express or draw their solution or requirement and the systems configure and align to these needs, either on a transitory basis for just the amount of time needed or as part of the start of something new.
This is not a pipe dream, there are people working to this end today, Intalio being one, K2 and Xsol being others I could name. These represent a paradigm shift for all of us.
We will still need programming languages, I for one am not against them but they are a link in the chain from human creativity and need and the subsequent realisation of that in the real / virtual world that is Web Business 2.0.
Good luck to the product teams able to reap incremental revenues from programming languages whether 1,2,3 or 4 generation, no doubt someone will decide to market a 5GL at some point, but that to me misses the point of the future and the need we all have to express, and affect realisation of our requirements. It is not long ago people had to get someone to connect them with another phone user on an internal and international phone system, Technology and programming languages enabled all of us to do it for ourselves without the intermediary being visible.
Roll on self determination and creation within the on-line world.
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