Re: [Haskell-cafe] Is Haskell a 5GL?

Ch. A. Herrmann wrote:

do you think that Haskell is a 3GL (third generation language) or a 5GL or that the hierarchy of programming language generations is useless?

I did a literature search on language generations a few years ago when I was preparing the first incarnation of the local Principles of Programming Languages course. There were three findings: 1) I could not find where the idea comes from. 2) All sources agree what 1GL, 2GL and 3GL are. 3) There is no consensus on what 4GL and 5GL are. (Different sources define them completely differently.) Hence, I just classify all current general-purpose languages as 3GL and consider the classification mostly meaningless for today's languages.