What you describe certainly has been my experience. Many of the markup languages that were designed to make it possible for "non coders" to write interfaces jus

What you describe certainly has been my experience. Many of the markup languages that were designed to make it possible for "non coders" to write interfaces just turned into another programming language, only clunky and irritating. For example, tag libraries like the JSTL were designed to split the programming between interface and back end, allowing designers to manage the programming logic in the interface. HTML and markup tags were fine, but in my experience, once you get into loops, conditionals, and so forth, the designers almost always send it back over to the programmers, who now have to learn a new (and generally half assed, in my opinion) set of tags to implement programming logic. As I remember, they pushed this pretty hard (the head first books even devised a mock scenario where a corporate memo banned the use of JSP code in a page). Ruby on Rails went with ruby code and helpers, and I think it was vastly more successful. YMMV of course, but the experience led me to believe that if you're going to program, just use a programming language[1]. As for this article? Well, the sub title is: "It's accelerating how businesses are able to impact their strategy." So, we have a sense of what we're in for if we choose to keep reading. Beyond that? Actually, I do think that things we used to write code for will be handled differently, and may not require programmers. This is nothing new for the industry. There was a time when a spreadsheet required a computing expert. Same for calculations, servers, publishing an article on what is now a "blog". Blogging engines totally accelerated how writers impacted their strategy. [1] a lot of people don't quite understand the hype and, yeah, attitude of ruby and rails programmers in the early days. I do think this community went too far with it, but the scenario (a corporate memo banning something) does get at why. The java world had gotten sort of insane, and ultimately was starting to rely on things like memos from above because that was the only way to imagine why anyone would actually write the way the spec said. There really was a massive cheer when someone (DHH in this case) just finally put up a giant screen at a conference saying, literally, "fuck you". Although I think you can achieve with more civility, that kind of bluntness is necessary to beat back the insanity in this field every now and then.