alt Hacker NewsExcel was the biggest example of a "4GL" that actually succeeded. They mentioned Access but Excel was by far more widely used. Excel enabled analysts to do so much on their own that they used to have to ask programmers in their IT department to do. Other spreadsheets too, at first, but Excel ended up dominating.
And it was an excellent local optimization that incurred giant costs for the whole organization. Every single place where there are this parallel excel IT world is a fucking security/compliance/data-security nightmare.