Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 50
Note from the history at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/04/r-3190/the_role_of_enterprise_generation_language.pdf, the origin of EGL (once called 4GL) goes back to the 1980s.
Very few studies of software as it is and as it runs.
Try http://www.research.ibm.com/people/n/nickmitchell/publications/lcsd2005.pdf to a paper called "Diary of a Datum" and http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297046 to another paper called "The causes of bloat, the limits of health". Both describe studies of large running applications in situ.
Full disclosure - I work for IBM Research and these papers were by folks in my department.
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