"Mendix, Betty Blocks, Outsystems" Interesting. I've never even heard of any of those products. They must be in some completely different space than I'm operat

"Mendix, Betty Blocks, Outsystems" Interesting. I've never even heard of any of those products. They must be in some completely different space than I'm operating in. In 1980 I was a database consultant, with a long-term account at NY Telephone. Their marketing department mainly used a 4GL called NOMAD. I have to say, it was really great for creating hierarchical databases and for formatting complex reports from it. In fact, when I moved on from that world, I've always missed it since then. Nothing I've used since then has actually worked as well as NOMAD for the purpose of generating reports from data. SQL did many of the same things, but not as easily. (And even though it was based on a hierarchical DB, you could do operations that were basically SQL's joins. So it was both relational and hierarchical. Although I'm not sure whether the word "relational" was used in that way at the time.) And at that time there was talk about how in 10 or 20 years even those 4GLs wouldn't be necessary any more because software would generate itself from specifications. I sure haven't seen that happening. In fact, my personal experience has been that, at least for what NOMAD was built to do, nothing since then has even done it as easily. But then again, I haven't even heard of the tools you named!! Are they just not popular yet because they haven't had time to reach their full audiences, or are they only used in very specific niches such that they don't have a lot of presence in places such as Hacker News?