Swift wrote:He likely meant what MS was going for with visual basic, except that all the code to do what you want is automatically there without needing to write it.
He is right to a certain degree, code reuse, where possible, is a much more cost effective method than completely re-writing from scratch. Obviously code reuse is not always possible, so i doubt his prediction will ever fully come true.
I would say Access is more what he is talking about than VB. And Access was kind of revolutionary when it came out and made a large step towards what Kalbar was talking about. I see non-programmers building programs with it, but mostly people get programmers in to develop their applications with it. However, it is rather inefficient and could never replace a specifically written program and I rarely see its use anymore outside of a glorified excel spreadsheet.
I won't say that Kalbar was completely wrong though. I'm sure that before Access, programmers wouldn't have thought a tool would come out that allowed non-programmers write software that easily.
As for your point. Copy and pasting code has also been around for quite some time. I use third party components fairly often, and sometimes even download free stuff off the internet (although only if they include source code, and then I rip the source code out and adjust it to my needs).
Sometimes re-writes are more efficient than code-reuse. Believe me, in some of the places I have worked the code is so bad that it would have been better just to scrap it and start again. When code is really bad it can take significantly longer to maintain it than clean code, that in the long run it would be faster to write it well from the beginning.
Anyway, from my various programming jobs what I have found is that most companies want more or less the same kind of functionality written in their programs, but are willing to pay decent money to have it molded to their own needs. And I have also found that non-programmers (and also many programmers) don't know the first thing about database design (an entire database in a single table?!
) or standardised and simple code, so I don't see software development falling out of the hands of programmers any time soon.
Had my first taste of C# .Net 3 the other day... I prefer windows apps to xaml. 
