I liked this post, and I think it speaks to a major problem in areas of software development that involve a lot of logic but are considered "not programming."

I liked this post, and I think it speaks to a major problem in areas of software development that involve a lot of logic but are considered "not programming." A lot of effort is put into technologies that allow "non-programmers" to work with these tiers of app development, and I think they generally backfire. The most common one is tag libraries in place of scripting. The Java world is probably the biggest offender here. The JSTL started out as a way to create cleaner looking pages - and maybe it has - but the spec got to the point where they were recreating the entire Java language as a separate set of tags. Supposedly, these tags are easier for "non-programmers" to use, but by the time you're setting properties for objects and using conditionals and loops, you may as well admit you're a programmer. I'm no big fan of long jsp pages, but I prefer Rails's approach to scripting: if a task requires programming logic, use a programming language. Ultimately, I found the "you're doing it wrong if you include scripting in a view" to be very unconvincing, especially if the tags you replace it with end up recreating the programming language you're not supposed to be using in the first place.