THE COSTS OF CHANGING TO A 4TH GENERATION COMPUTER LANGUAGE

The findings from interviewing 16 software developers who had changed, or considered changing, from a third to a fourth generation computer language are reported. The research was to evaluate whether changing c omputer languages had improved the performance of developers. The conc lusion was that the key drivers of productivity are social and not tec hnical. The costs of changing languages were higher than expected and changing languages hinders estimating, planning and project management . Changing languages should be avoided if possible.