Why don't you imagine a perfect world where business people define their rules and easily draw the screen they want, and the rest is auto generated by the tool

Why don't you imagine a perfect world where business people define their rules and easily draw the screen they want, and the rest is auto generated by the tool (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_enginee...)? Apparently, there are some great complexities in the software engineering process which can't be visualized or simplified enough to be aided by a tool. SQL or the programming language you have is textual dsl's, abstracting you from the details / complexities and powerful enough that you can access all the underlying functionality. ORM's, ActiveRecord pattern etc. are all another abstraction but they're not as powerful as bare SQL. As long as you don't hit their wall, you'll be OK. But keep in mind that each layer makes some functionality inaccessible. I once wrote a visual designer for Castle ActiveRecord & NHibernate, called ActiveWriter. It was great for the begginer on that technologies. Once you need more, the tool lacks the functionality since it gets harder and harder to implement all the details of a textual DSL in a graphical DSL. Today, I prefer Fluent NHibernate for my mappings since it's more complete on the mapping front. It seems more work but it deals with the complexity better than my own graphical tool.