[ont.events] UW CS Colloquium, Prof. McCracken on "The Impact of Fourth Generation Languages on Computer Science Education"

mwang@watmath.UUCP (mwang) (02/26/85)

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         Fourth  Generation  Languages (4GLs) are rapidly moving
         toward  a  dominant position in the development of com-
         mercial  data  processing  applications.   Systems like
         NOMAD,  RAMIS,  FOCUS and a multitude of others are in-
         creasingly  accepted  both as tools for the experts and
         as  a  way  for  DP-naive users to get simple jobs done
         with  only  a  few days training.  Some major organiza-
         tions  do  essentially no new applications in 3GLs like
         Cobol  and  PL/1;  some  organizations  have  literally
         thousands  of end-users who can set up small jobs them-
         selves, or at least write report requests to get infor-
         mation from existing databases.

         What  does  this  say about computer science education?
         Most  computer science graduates do not go into commer-
         cial data processing application development.  But this
         revolution should not be ignored.  The computer science
         curriculum may need only fine tuning at this stage, but
         the  major changes under way in commercial applications
         development surely will have an impact sooner or later.