Philip Brittan's Blog

No More Programmers

I hear that Macromedia Flash is going to alleviate the burden of having programmers. I�ve been hearing for the past two decades about how this or that new software development system was going to allow business users or designers to create software, and therefore companies wouldn�t have to employ expensive programmers. As a further benefit, IT would be much more responsive because users would just create what they wanted on the fly without having to wait for developers to come get requirements, do design, code, test, refactor, code and test again, etc. (or maybe nerds are just unpopular).

There have been a number of visual languages that have promised this but none of them has gained widespread usage. Sun has even announced something in this category, and it appears that some folks are moving beyond visual programming into audio debugging. I have a friend who left the software development world entirely to go get an MBA and become a banker because he thought that Microsoft Access would allow business types to create their own software and therefore put an end to the profession of programmer � that was 7 years ago. The Web was supposed to allow graphic designers to easily create on-line applications without gorpy tech skills. Guess what happened?

The flaw with the programmer-less vision is that building software involves a lot more than the memorization of programming languages. Any experienced developer knows that learning new languages is not hard. The hard part is understanding how to design software (and I don�t mean just the graphics) and how to use whatever tools are available to create systems that solve the right problems, and that are robust, scalable, and maintainable. Learning how to dip your brush in the paint is the least part of being an artist.

Comments

• I encourage questions to Philip
  As someone who works with Philip, I encourage you to ask him questions and get to know him. He is a long-time innovator in the JAVA technology space with some real leading edge thinking on UI design and thin client technologies. He really knows his stuff and I am proud to have encouraged him to BLOG.

  - Steve

  Posted by: sabbanat on July 29, 2003 at 03:22 PM

• Complexity
  I think one of the issues here is that a large part of programming is learning to deal with complexity. You only have to look at most requirements documents or object models to see that.

  Also, with most projects technical problems are often trivial compared to dealing with people. That's why project management is such a big deal and why really good developers often work on projects that fail.

  Ian.

  Posted by: ifairman on July 30, 2003 at 01:45 AM

• Fully Agree
  No More Programmers? Not likely - it's more a state of mind than a career. The ability to tell the machine what to do is only half of the job.

  A programmer must also know what the user wants to do or will have to do, and work to make that as obvious and painless as possible to the end user.

  Posted by: luggypm on July 30, 2003 at 02:46 AM

• Bugs in Spreadsheets
  Spreadsheet are perhaps one of the best examples of end-user programming but "There is a substantial body of research showing that spreadsheets often contain bugs. For example, field audits of real-world spreadsheets have found that 20-40% of these contain bugs, and that between 1% and 4% of all cells contain bugs [Teo and Tan 1997]."

  http://www.cs.uml.edu/~hgoodell/EndUser/blend/papers/Margaret_Burnett_et_al.html

  I think debugging and testing are two aspects of programming that are not addressed by "going visual" and without that we'll still be dependent on programmers.

  Ian.
  

  Posted by: ifairman on July 30, 2003 at 05:39 AM

• No silver bullet
  Brooks phrase is probably overused :), but seems relevant again. As the article says, there's so much more beyond code in development. Perhaps the act of coding will diminish, but the skill set to create the product won't change significantly since the hard part is understanding what to build and how to approach it. The construction part is relatively straight forward.

  Ironically, what do you see on job postings? "Must have 93 years experience in Java/C++ and used Websphere 4.1.0.3 for 3 years."

  I wish more business folks understood what Phillip seems to understand.

  Posted by: ckessel on July 30, 2003 at 01:40 PM

• Depends on the type of visual tool
  Firstly I would observe that posting a question such as this in a forum primarily frequented by programmers would not unearth too many with a opposite view ;)

  Most of my career has been as project manager or business analyst. My take on this is that the most important thing is to get the customers requirements accurately recorded and understood. Some people can do this best using visual metaphors for the specification. Most complex application designs also require multiple levels of abstraction to allow for the limitations of the human mind.

  Pulling this all together I think that the visual tool using UML class diagrams combined with Object Constraint Language and Action Semantics will realise the dream of Model Driven Architecture. Thus allowing programmers to use a class diagrammer with short declarative statements to generate all (?) code for their application.

  I am not entirely convinced but see the potential. This method appears to have the ability to completely define the logic required. The generators are outcome specific, e.g. see http://sourceforge.net/projects/andromda for an example of J2EE generation without the completeness that OCL and Action Semantics (UML 1.5) will bring.

  Posted by: davewynter on August 05, 2003 at 02:26 AM

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