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I have some perspective on this because I have worked in an environment with developers writing code in a platform that was originally intended for non-develope

by kyllo 11y ago

I have some perspective on this because I have worked in an environment with developers writing code in a platform that was originally intended for non-developers. In other words it is basically a rules engine that offers IF, LOOP, CASE, and a few other basic imperative language constructs, and of course math operators. At first we had analysts writing the scripts to program the system, and that worked OK for a few years, but it didn't scale with the workload of requests and we had to divide the labor into business analysts and developers. Today it is a department full of developers writing thousands of scripts in a proprietary language with no package/module system and only global variables, so there is lots of copying and pasting but no real code reuse. There is also no syntax highlighting, code completion, debugger, automated test harness, or deployment scripts. They do everything manually. And of course no "real" trained software developer wants to touch the whole mess with a ten-foot pole, so it stays that way. After experiencing the horrors of such a system I say leave the programming to real programmers, or become a real programmer yourself. If you try to bring programming to non-programmers, you will never be able to pay down the technical debt they rack up.

geoelectric 11y ago
Every time I see a a keyword-based or graphical-based test automation system aimed at allowing "everyone to write test automation" it ends up devolving into this. Worse, it gets in the way of the people who -do- end up grasping programming. I'm not in the "it's a talent and you either have it or don't" camp, but I do absolutely believe the core skills of any programming task are in problem breakdown and solution visualization. The best environments serve those two purposes specifically, and preferably as transparently as possible. Environments which end up with a rigid expression in the service of accessibility usually end up counterproductive very quickly because they don't generalize enough. There's a fine line between "opinionated" and "obstinate."

by kyllo 11y ago

geoelectric 11y ago

Every time I see a a keyword-based or graphical-based test automation system aimed at allowing "everyone to write test automation" it ends up devolving into this. Worse, it gets in the way of the people who -do- end up grasping programming. I'm not in the "it's a talent and you either have it or don't" camp, but I do absolutely believe the core skills of any programming task are in problem breakdown and solution visualization. The best environments serve those two purposes specifically, and preferably as transparently as possible. Environments which end up with a rigid expression in the service of accessibility usually end up counterproductive very quickly because they don't generalize enough. There's a fine line between "opinionated" and "obstinate."