programming-languages

Fifth generation languages?

I have been asked for these kind of languages, my first naive attempt brought two list

List A)

A programming language based on constraints rather than algorithms to solve the problems. eg. Prolog

List B)

A programming language that contain visual tools to help develop a program. eg. VB

Digging deeply into the internet I feel the first one is more accurate, but the second is still appearing into the results.

So my question is: What are fifth generation programming languages? The first kind or the second?

I would appreciate any links, articles or any other useful resource to understand more about the topic.

EDIT

I'm bringing this to the main question:

Oscar: I've also found references to Prolog, Scheme, Heskell, Lisp while searching on the topic? Are these "more" 5th or are those like VB.

Charlie Martin: Well, Lisp can't really be a 5th gen language because it's older than everything except, maybe, FORTRAN. And Scheme is a dialect of Lisp. But yeah, I've seen functional languages -- Haskell, ML, Erlang, etc -- called 'fifth generation' –

So, is there a chance for constraint based programming languages be called 5th gen?

Thanks.

Solution

  • "Fifth generation programming languages" was an attempt to push logic programming, constraint programming, and satisfaction/unification based programming (like Prolog). Golly, that must have been back in the 80's. There was a big Japanese initiative, back when we thought Japan was Taking Over and Buying Everything.

    The usual list of generations is:

    1. Straight machine language, Goldstein and von Neumann
    2. Assembly languages
    3. "High level" languages, starting with FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL.
    4. Either report-generator languages like RPG, or OO programming
    5. Fifth generation

    The terminology is pretty well out of favor today, I think.