"When I was a young engineer, there was a gruff old programmer named Larry who often imparted his wisdom to us young'uns. A man in his forties, he had that gritty, seen-it-all manner that bespoke years of hard-fought battles in the coding trenches. His was a heart of gold covered in a cloak of cynicism; imagine Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Perl programmer."
"Wikipedia has a good overview of the fourth-generation language concept, which was supposed to sweep across software like a revelation. Among other things, 4GLs are sometimes described as "program-generating languages." They are a higher-level abstraction from familiar third-generation languages like Java and JavaScript, and tend to focus on more natural language syntax. Terms like natural language interface and program-generating certainly do sound like generative AI, don't they?"
An experienced programmer insisted that fourth-generation languages (4GL) had never worked and never would. 4GLs aimed to be program-generating, using higher-level, more natural-language-like syntax compared with third-generation languages. A 1981 book titled Application Development Without Programmers predicted artificial intelligence could replace human developers. Modern descendants of 4GLs include WYSIWYG editors, rapid application development frameworks, and low-code/no-code platforms. These modern tools still require knowledgeable developers to operate effectively, preventing them from delivering fully automated development and falling short of the original promise of removing developer involvement.
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