Comment by twoodfin

I don’t recall seeing entire economies betting on 4GLs.

Not even a nitpick because the scale is indeed orders of magnitude different, but…

There was a lot of chatter, government attention, and both public and private money chasing 4GL’s in the 1980’s, due to what turned out to be (for the US, at least) a phantom “software crisis”. It was mostly for naught?

Same in Japan, where you can argue about the motivations of MITI’s “Fourth Generation Project”, but at its software core was a primeval 4GL in the form of Prolog. Their perceptions of a Japanese software crisis were ultimately more well-founded.