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Yes, yes, yes! I despair at the lack of options for Rapid Application Development. Web development is a problem that has been solved a million times over; why i

Yes, yes, yes! I despair at the lack of options for Rapid Application Development. Web development is a problem that has been solved a million times over; why is it still so hard? (Sure, you could say browsers, scaling, and interactivity all need special consideration.) I believe there are certain personalities drawn to software development, who are very detail-oriented and love technical challenges, to the detriment of the end result - forest vs trees. Just look at people who want to make games and end up writing a game engine, vs people who jump into Flash and make do with the tools available. Personally, I would much prefer to just feed in a specification, or set of constraints, to a program, and have it spit out a working program. Program synthesis seems like an interesting area of research, but fairly basic at the moment. I imagine any useful synthesis will be domain-specific - generating a JSON web service/API will be quite different to writing a music visualizer.

niftich 10y ago
Great points, but, rapid website development is a solved problem with templated builders. The problem comes when we need a more complex site/app than something Wix or Weebly or Wordpress can provide. Then in current practice, it's often back to square one, but it shouldn't be. We have opininated frameworks like Rails and Django that save a lot of time, but only cover the featureset of a CRUD app. There is a lack of opinionated frameworks that work at a higher level, but still below that of drag-and-drop templated website generators.