I'm really glad to have this chance to muse about this because in the ongoing “mobile revolution” a lot of new tools have appeared, all of them following the same programming paradigm: basically procedural, focusing on HOW we do things instead of on WHAT we want to achieve.
Since the beginning GeneXus (a programming language created by Nicolás Jodal and Breogán Gonda) has had a different paradigm. Breogán and Nicolas were probably influenced by different languages that appeared at the time. As Bret said, there was more variety because the “correct way to do things” was not yet established.
The influence of “goal-oriented” languages is evident in GeneXus. It was always clear that WHAT is quite more important, in the long term, that HOW. The GeneXus model focuses on WHAT from the beginning, and always emphasized “declaring” over “programming”.
Breogan always say that GeneXus is a Knowledge-based development platform.
Knowledge-based development has two premises that other languages don’t have:
- Capture WHAT information the user wants (user views)
- Infer information based on these user views.
In GeneXus we have remained steadfast on not incorporating programming practices “oriented on HOW”, and evolving on a different path instead. From its point of view, the 3rd generation languages of today (with their relatively low level of abstraction) are not very different from the binary code of yesteryear.
Some very specific things you can do in those languages may not be achievable with GeneXus; however the things you do in GeneXus will be useful over time... generating COBOL code one day, and Objective-C code decades later.
GeneXus has long resisted object-oriented trends, prioritizing declarative techniques based on data and rules instead. Things like threading, exceptions, locks, &c do not belong in GeneXus, because we believe those are part of “HOW-space”.
I’m a GeneXus development team member and I don’t think GeneXus is a perfect language. However, I do believe that most of its principles are sound, and lead to a different programming paradigm. In fact, I’m expecting (and hoping) GeneXus will be an inspiration to create software in a different way in the future.
Again, I loved this call to think about the world of programming. I did it ;)
