COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

The author mentions "4GLs" were all the rage in the early 1990s, but I doubt that that was true outside of the mainframe world. The 4GL movement, as a conscious movement, seems to have always been highly mainframe oriented (the Wikipedia article mentions reducing the amount of punched cards necessary for a program as initial goals). By the 1990s you could categorize many languages as 4GL, but I doubt this term was used with any enthusiasm outside of the mainframe world. It was the opposite of a buzzword.

1992 wasn't too long ago. Linus Torvalds has already released Linux, and Guido van Rossum was already working on Python. Perl was already gaining popularity, and Haskell also saw it first versions released. The forefront of technology was already shifting from expensive workstations to consumer-grade PCs and language designers gave little thought to 4GL concepts, even when they happened to design something that could qualify as a 4GL for personal computers (e.g. dBase, HyperTalk, AppleScript).

I agree that human-like text is a bad idea for most use cases of programming, but I think this is not why the 4GL movement failed, and in fact most 4GLs weren't more "natural language-like" than the 3GL COBOL. I think the main problem was that the 4GL movement has never really defined a new generation or anything useful at all. The previously defined generations of language introduced revolutionary changes: translation from friendlier assembly language to machine code (2GL) and compilation (3GL). The only change we can properly define from the loose definition of 4GL is "put more features that used to be external routines or library directly into the language".

This approach worked out relatively well when the language was domain-specific. This is how we got some of the most successful 4GLs like SQL, R and MATLAB. These languages have syntax that deals directly with data tables, statistics and linear algebra directly into the language and became very useful in their own niche. The concept of a general-purpose 4GL, on the other hand, was always destined to boil down to an overly bloated language.

I wrote a _lot_ of Perl, starting with Perl4 cgi scripts in the mid 90s, then Perl5 and FastCGI and Apache ModPerl. I loved it as a language. But by the time I left that gig in 2008, nobody wanted Perl any more. I mostly drifted around PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript for a few years until moving away from full time coding and up (sideways?) into leadership and mentoring roles.

Interestingly I got _into_ the Perl gig when I bailed on a COBOL maintenance gig where it was clear nobody was at all interested in listening to how their 10+ year old custom COBOL warehouse management app (written by the company the boss's sister used to own) running on EOLed Wang minicomputers - was completely incapable of dealing with 4 digit dates for Y2K. I jumped ship to make that somebody else's problem.

The story of languages like COBOL isn't that a language is too deeply embedded to become too expensive to replace. It just means the replacement will happen at a higher level - the business itself, and will take more time as a result.