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Comment by zedfoxus | Hacker News Reader

OpenEdge has pretty good SQL support. Progress management I talked to did NOT want to stand behind SQL for CRUD applications. They were OK with SQL's use for ETL and were adamant that OpenEdge should be used only with 4GL for CRUD application. I wrote several blogs to explain the cool CRUD apps one could write. I did observe that 4GL devs were very shy to use anything but 4GL to work with Progress. Yes, SQL is treated as a second/third class citizen even though I felt SQL was an exceptional way to use OpenEdge with other languages. If there were valid technical reasons to not use SQL, I didn't hear it from 4GL devs or Progress management.

To be fair, 4GL and OpenEdge work very well together.

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> Progress management I talked to did NOT want to stand behind SQL for CRUD applications.

Of course not - the entire business model behind OpenEdge (which is far from "open") is to have applications built with their laughably irrelevant ABL/4GL language and only working with data in OLTP / one-record-at-a-time because that makes it almost impossible to switch to the conventional (RDBMS + web-service + frontend) architecture that the entire industry shifted to 20 years ago.

OpenEdge (nee "Progress DB") was a cool platform in the late-1980s through to the early 2000s because it supported IBM's AS/400, MS Windows, and Linux - with their UI system that let you design an input form once and have it magically work in text-mode AS/400 terminals and the Windows desktop - but the fundamental design of OpenEdge is still based on its AS/400 roots and it really doesn't work well with modern systems (e.g. it has this design with multiple "broker" processes which is a PITA to configure).

Their anti-open-source article on Progress' website that the GP post linked to was infuriating to read: it felt like the same anti-GPL propaganda that did the rounds around 2003 when SCO was claiming Linux contained their copyrighted code and Microsoft was astroturfing articles about the "risks" of open-source code and seemingly intentionally confusing people about MIT/Apache vs. GPL licenses. Le sigh.

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