From: Mike Stephens <rubfor@...>
Date: 2011-08-01T16:24:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby a "4th generation language"? Credible sources?

The Wikipedia articles are spurious.

I think this is closer to the truth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Second-generation_programming_language

Third generation came into mark the first languages a level above
assembler. Fourth generation was applied to things like Focus which
dealt with typical DP tasks by removing some of the chores, particularly
empty datasets or starts/ends of datasets. That theme would lead you to
say SQL or say PL/SQL were 4GL but of course people now expect more of a
programming language so would reject these as 'languages'.

Things moved away from this pattern. We seemed to revert to lower level
languages like C but added in all sorts of powerful features and
libraries. Ruby with its iterators deals with some things in a way 4GLs
did.

So while the terminology is obsolete, what is interesting is why the
author wanted to distinguish Ruby from C#. As I recall, 4GLs were
interpreted and thus capable of dynamic programming. Perhaps that's what
he/she was getting at.

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