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catapart 37 minutes ago

Being honest, I don't know what a 4GL is. But the rest of them absolutely DID claim to help me do things I was already doing. And, actually, NFTs and the Metaverse even specifically claimed to be able to help with coding in various different flavors. It was mostly superficial bullshit, but... that's kind of the whole tech for those two things.

In any case, Segways promised to be a revolution to how people travel - something I was already doing and something that the marketing was predicated on. 3DTVs - a "better" way to watch TV, which I had already been doing. NFTs - (among other things) a financially superior way to bank, which I had already been doing. Metaverse - a more meaningful way to interact with my team on the internet, which I had already been doing.

rsynnott 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

A 4GL is a "fourth generation language"; they were going to reduce the need for icky programmers back in the 70s. SQL is the only real survivor, assuming you're willing to accept that it counts at all. "This will make programmers obsolete" is kind of a recurrent form of magic tech; see 4GLs, 5GLs, the likes of Microsoft Access, the early noughties craze for drag-and-drop programming, 'no-code', and so forth. Even _COBOL_ was kind of originally marketed this way.