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The belief that better tools will obsolete the need for all that coding effort is probably as old as computer programming itself. Fred Brooks, author of The My
by wes-exp 13y ago
The belief that better tools will obsolete the need for all that coding effort is probably as old as computer programming itself.
Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month, dismissed the idea in his 1986 paper No Silver Bullet:
"... building software will always be hard. There is no silver bullet."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_silver_bullet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_silver_bullet
- wpietri 13y agoIt's certainly at lest 30 years old. Before my voice changed I went to my first computer conference. People were selling tools there that would let business types do "programming" via just writing what they want in English. For minicomputers. Of course, they had to write in a minimal, highly structured pseudo-English. And the problem domain was highly restricted. So it was basically programming, except less effective. A fine example of the phenomenon that if enough people want something, somebody will come along and sell it to them, whether or not it actually works. I used to think this was malice, but as far as I can tell, greed, narcissism, and the Dunning-Kruger effect can explain it perfectly well.