There was also PowerBuilder and other "4GL" tools.
As an old fart, GUI toolkits and building tools are one of those categories of absolutely essential software that gets scrapped and rebuilt (not in a good way) for every platform.
Kind of like IDEs for new languages, to the point of the article. First comes the language and basic CLI tools, and then about ten years later you might have a mature IDE with full language-specific syntax coloring, autocomplete, visual debugging, variable watches, etc.
And these 4GL tools were doing this with BASIC variants (not compiled) atop maybe 200-300 Mhz processors and 16-64MB (not GB, MB) of RAM. It blows my mind that modern OSes have slowdown and stuttering when the amount of CPU, considering multicore, more pipelining, branch prediction, etc, is likely 100x stronger than the the CPUs back then.
The 4GL languages/tools were all closed source and that did not age well. PowerBuilder folded (probably killed by Visual Basic), and then Visual Basic was killed in one of Microsofts platform purges.
They also were tightly coupled with databases in a UI --> DB architecture. As server architectures exploded in complexity beyond that, the 4GL tools couldn't adapt, partly because they were leveraging so much power of SQL under the hood, and the various server and RPC/invocations never offered the same power and flexibility.
But I can hear you .. SQL over the wire? Like send SQL to a backend service so it can be intercepted and injected and all that? Yup, probably part of the problem. Thick clients and direct internal LAN communication is an implicit requirement.
As an old fart, GUI toolkits and building tools are one of those categories of absolutely essential software that gets scrapped and rebuilt (not in a good way) for every platform.
Kind of like IDEs for new languages, to the point of the article. First comes the language and basic CLI tools, and then about ten years later you might have a mature IDE with full language-specific syntax coloring, autocomplete, visual debugging, variable watches, etc.
And these 4GL tools were doing this with BASIC variants (not compiled) atop maybe 200-300 Mhz processors and 16-64MB (not GB, MB) of RAM. It blows my mind that modern OSes have slowdown and stuttering when the amount of CPU, considering multicore, more pipelining, branch prediction, etc, is likely 100x stronger than the the CPUs back then.
The 4GL languages/tools were all closed source and that did not age well. PowerBuilder folded (probably killed by Visual Basic), and then Visual Basic was killed in one of Microsofts platform purges.
They also were tightly coupled with databases in a UI --> DB architecture. As server architectures exploded in complexity beyond that, the 4GL tools couldn't adapt, partly because they were leveraging so much power of SQL under the hood, and the various server and RPC/invocations never offered the same power and flexibility.
But I can hear you .. SQL over the wire? Like send SQL to a backend service so it can be intercepted and injected and all that? Yup, probably part of the problem. Thick clients and direct internal LAN communication is an implicit requirement.