Is there any demand for 4GL? [closed]

Question

what can i do with 4GL that i cant do with VB?

what industries are seeking for 4GL programmers?

Answer 1

As for Progress 4GL or as correctly stated above (OpenEdge) ABL, it's origins are procedural and not object oriented - though today the ABL has Objects, Classes, inheritance and so on. A main feature that distinguishes the 4GL/ABL from many other languages is the coupling and native support of database and other operations (f.e. web service calls).

Not to be forgotten, Progress Software to my knowledge almost only - at least in the past - relied on commercializing tools which means that you need to buy licenses to get the database (other than for testing) for use with the 4GL/ABL, the Progress Interpreter which processes the .r-Code in which the Code (.p-Code Files) are compiled and so on.

As for the demand, it can be said, that Progress Software itself states that Progress products and technology are used at over 60,000 organizations in 140 countries including 90% of the Fortune 500. Often those products are in special or background areas and perhaps not that obvious to the public. Compared to VB I guess that the demand of the knowledge is not comparable in the sense that VB has a broader market and other areas of usage (I guess people that use Progress Products want commercial support and reliability for every tool of the portfolio).

Answer 2

Job postings on Monster.com that match VB:

2595

Job postings on Monster.com that match 4GL:

39

Answer 3

Only 4 postings on here mentioning 4GL including this one isn't really a positive sign for it either.

Answer 4

You'd get better luck searching for jobs using the term 'OpenEdge'. Plus, as Progress developers know they are in a niche market, the bulk of the knowledge can be found at www.progresstalk.com and www.oehive.org.

~Cyrix

Answer 5

Informix 4GL is still very much alive and kicking!.. A lot of core production apps, written 15-20 years in i4gl are still running in enterprise and government!