[avighnay]

4GL was a buzz word in the late nineties when I entered software profession. It was pushed by ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software majors of that era such as SAP & BaaN.

Even though such software are the core of an enterprise today. Many technologies that they pioneered did not gain mainstream adoption after the entry of Internet software companies such as Google/Facebook/Amazon.

Take for example what is now a buzz "Low code No code", it is a poor ghost of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) - https://www.omg.org/mda/ . Enterprise software always wants to push software to the realm of standard components and modules. That cycle was broken around 2010 due distraction from the smart phone wave.

Other techs of that era - ESB, WSDL, SOAP, SOA, UDDI, BPM, Business Rules, EDI, Data Mapping (all are almost but forgotten). Many of them are getting re-bottled e.g. Microservices

Enterprise software has not had any major breakthroughs since. Glamour of new tech from Internet giants who invent it for their specific purpose is pushed more often than not, on to enterprise systems by other software vendors/consultants pouting it as the new and best. This has made standardization almost impossible and hence kept software always in the "handicraft" mode.

[exdsq]

Model-Based Software Engineering still pops up in some environments, like LabVIEW or whatever that Matlab one is (they use it at NASA on some of the critical code, name escapes me). I've done some pretty cool things with Model-Driven Testing but never had a chance to use it as part of my job. GraphWalker [0] for example lets you build a model of an application where nodes are states and edges are actions to get 100% automated coverage (not No Code, but Cool Code). I used it to test HackerNews once in my free time combining it with the Page Object Model in Selenium which worked surprisingly well. You still need to build the framework and now an additional model, but you get all the tests for free.

[0] https://graphwalker.github.io

[Jtsummers]

Matlab Simulink, probably. It's actually pretty neat, but I haven't touched it in over a decade now. It was useful for our embedded systems to have an executable model versus a prose specification document, and then it did get used to feed into the testing routine. Since the models were simpler to understand, confidence in them was higher. Differences in test results could be readily determined to be problems in the system and not the model after a quick analysis of the model ("Yep, that's supposed to be X, not Y" or "Nope, Y is correct, that's an error in the model here.").

[exdsq]

Simulink! That's the one! Thanks for the reminder - I googled but couldn't find it straight away.