I worked as a programmer in the 1990s, when I got paid to write things in C, C++, Perl, Khoros (I guess that's a "visual 4GL"?), IDL (the array language), VB, SQL, INFORMIX's horrible forms thing (which was not especially "visual"), sh, csh (not my fault), and occasionally Tcl. It's true that PHP, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, and Lua came out in the 1990s (Python is from 1990, so arguably the 1980s), but they became widely used in the 2000s. In fact, even Perl was considered kind of déclassé until these "lightweight languages" took over the world, and then Perl became déclassé again after being eclipsed by Python, Ruby, and most surprisingly, JS.
(OCaml is not a "lightweight language" and is not like the others, and consequently never became popular.)
I don't recognize your description as corresponding to any events I remember. Sun was pushing Java. Microsoft was pushing C++, then Java, and then when Sun sued them, C#. Apple wasn't pushing much of anything until they bought NeXT, and then they started pushing Objective-C. As far as I know Oracle was pushing PL/SQL and cisco was pushing bletcherous IOS commands. Microsoft was pushing VB, which sort of resembles what you're saying, but VB wasn't a 4GL (the language was just 1960s Basic minus line numbers and plus subroutine arguments) and was actually spectacularly successful at what it did; it just wasn't good at making web sites. Borland was pushing Delphi. I guess in a way Microsoft was pushing Access? Are you thinking of Microsoft Access?
Maybe you were thinking of PowerBuilder? It was spectacularly successful at what it did, too (again, not building websites), and it was a visual 4GL, but it was being pushed by Powersoft, not a big corporate, until (Wikipedia tells me) Sybase bought it for 0.9 Instagrams in 1995. I never saw anybody use PowerBuilder but I didn't use Microsoft Windows a lot.
When you say, "they soon built their own", do you mean VBA and PowerShell, or what?
> Microsoft was pushing VB, which sort of resembles what you're saying, but VB wasn't a 4GL
Every marketing department was calling their company's new software development product/language/whatever a "Fourth Generation Language" back then. There's no actual definition for what it really means. Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP represent a trend that peaked the 1990's, some came before and some after, so there's no need to read "1990's" literally.
My total memory (i.e. work, study, and hobby) of that extended decade (1985-ish to 2005-ish) was VB, VBA (Access, Excel), Java on Windows, Quattro Pro, dBASE 3+, Perl, Cobol on IBM (and ICL), and a myriad other obscure mainframe languages and mini-languages that probably still get used in banks and insurance companies.
> I don't recognize your description as corresponding to any events I remember
My previous description of that time was quite typical for many of us. For example, I remember in 2001 developing a five-line Word macro for an accounting department on a leftover 386 sitting in the corner running Windows 95 that read in a file couriered in daily from some other company's Unix system that stripped out some incompatible data from each line. After I deployed it into production, the user every morning started Word, opened a Word document that contained a button on a form, clicked on the button, selected the day's file from the floppy, then waited (at the water cooler) while the macro ran. They then renamed the output file so the date was in the name, and copied it from the LAN to the mainframe using some proprietary program, so it could be input (with the funny Unix bytes removed) to the overnight processing run. Perhaps you worked in the other company sending that Unix-based file to us every day, and didn't see the ongoing after-effects of your C++ program that produced the file.
I worked as a programmer in the 1990s, when I got paid to write things in C, C++, Perl, Khoros (I guess that's a "visual 4GL"?), IDL (the array language), VB, SQL, INFORMIX's horrible forms thing (which was not especially "visual"), sh, csh (not my fault), and occasionally Tcl. It's true that PHP, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, and Lua came out in the 1990s (Python is from 1990, so arguably the 1980s), but they became widely used in the 2000s. In fact, even Perl was considered kind of déclassé until these "lightweight languages" took over the world, and then Perl became déclassé again after being eclipsed by Python, Ruby, and most surprisingly, JS.
(OCaml is not a "lightweight language" and is not like the others, and consequently never became popular.)
I don't recognize your description as corresponding to any events I remember. Sun was pushing Java. Microsoft was pushing C++, then Java, and then when Sun sued them, C#. Apple wasn't pushing much of anything until they bought NeXT, and then they started pushing Objective-C. As far as I know Oracle was pushing PL/SQL and cisco was pushing bletcherous IOS commands. Microsoft was pushing VB, which sort of resembles what you're saying, but VB wasn't a 4GL (the language was just 1960s Basic minus line numbers and plus subroutine arguments) and was actually spectacularly successful at what it did; it just wasn't good at making web sites. Borland was pushing Delphi. I guess in a way Microsoft was pushing Access? Are you thinking of Microsoft Access?
Maybe you were thinking of PowerBuilder? It was spectacularly successful at what it did, too (again, not building websites), and it was a visual 4GL, but it was being pushed by Powersoft, not a big corporate, until (Wikipedia tells me) Sybase bought it for 0.9 Instagrams in 1995. I never saw anybody use PowerBuilder but I didn't use Microsoft Windows a lot.
When you say, "they soon built their own", do you mean VBA and PowerShell, or what?