> It was gloriously easy to prototype but if you had to interface to external systems or any other thing they didn't think of, you would spend an enormous amou

> It was gloriously easy to prototype but if you had to interface to external systems or any other thing they didn't think of, you would spend an enormous amount of effort on making it work. Some of them didn't even have any significant abstraction support. The only one I know of that had any decent level of abstraction was the Clarion template system and I havent seen anything as powerful in any other coding tool. On a basic level its like a macro language like you see encapsulating data structures in windows .h files but because its much more than that ie put some data into it and it took and built stuff for you in a structured framework, it can be expanded to do practically anything and if it didnt do stuff you could expand it by calling external dll's which did things like popup windows for further input or processed stuff. I remember reading that it won some code productivity thing where it had beaten factory teams from MS and/or Oracle or some other big names but this was a long time ago.