> Software of this type is needed to do a chore, and honestly if the tools are in place, it could be re-created in an afternoon rather than extended when the ti

> Software of this type is needed to do a chore, and honestly if the tools are in place, it could be re-created in an afternoon rather than extended when the time comes. I agree that it's supposed to do a chore, so it should be as easy to churn it out as possible. However, if we were to follow your printer analogy, the proper way to do that with a printer would be to just build a machine that makes it very easy to create a custom printer that types out exactly what you want it to type out! What we have instead is a very general typesetter that can be convinced to print a particular picture (by feeding it an automatically-generated program in e.g. PS!). The application in question is pretty much a simple CRUD that generates a report in the end so that whoever is ordering knows what to order and from where. IMHO, just like printing doesn't require the user to know PS, this should not involve programming. It's not that programming should be easy, it's just that the CRUD model is so easily understood and so orthogonal that building one should not require anything more than a wizard asking you about the data it should collect.