I don’t know about the readers of this blog, or any other Gen users, but I have the perception among the general computing community that Gen is perceived to be “old”.
This is true – Gen is “old” but with age comes wisdom !
COBOL is “mature” but there are more lines of COBOL out there than anything else, but that does not make it “old”!
 I believe that in the computing community, the term “old” had negative connotations – “old” means that it is “no good”. “Mature” on the other hand means that it (whatever “it” is) has been through thorough testing, and had a few releases to iron out all the problems.
Languages like Java on the other hand, are seen as “mature” despite only being around for 10 years – languages like the upstart Ruby are seen as cutting edge. Cutting edge these days seems to be synonymous with “better” but I would argue that “new is not necessarily best”. With a total system like Gen, whilst it has been around for a few years (putting it firmly in the mature camp) it has also innovated with each and every release (some more than others) and it has kept on adding new features – surely this puts it somewhere toward cutting edge ?
My point is that because Gen has been around for some time, it should be trusted by organisations that need a mature, stable development platform, but should excite the generation of developers that need to be seen to be at the leading edge of development.
But this is not the case ! Why ?
I believe that it is because of the fact that gen has a “mature” status in the industry, much like COBOL, or any mainframe skills these days – show me a developer that would choose a green-screen COBOL development environment over a PC-based IDE with online help and interactive, colour coded syntax highlighting !
So the fact that Gen has been seen as mature for some years is a good thing from organisations wanting stability, but a bad thing in terms of attracting young developers to the toolset.
How do we fix it ?
The fact that with recent developments, the tool has been making inroads into using Eclipse should help – but possibly making it support something like Ruby sooner rather than later (Ruby is seen possibly as a next-generation Java by some). It may be that Ruby is not considered mature for industrial-scale systems yet, but then again, Java wasn’t considered scalable until a few years ago, but it is now.
So, then we come back to the argument that mature is best !
