A Land Far Away

( Kalbar) Zic: Let's be honest...programming will be a total commodity in 10 years. In fact, drag and drop programming is 5 years away. It's a dying industry.

How long ago did Kalbar say that? I'm curious because I'm a programmer and I'm wondering how much longer I'm going to have a job for.

about 2,5 years ago hehe

its simply the best quote ever

What did he mean by drag and drop programming anyway? I mean Access has been out for 15+ years already...

i have no idea..

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.

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.

Well, thing is, as long as processors are the way they are, you have to write code to do things. OR go opensource and borrow other peoples code and pay tribute. If youre writing something commercially you have to actually write. You can drag and drop buttons and sliders and whatnot in all libraries that are GUI. You dont write "ok i want a button here, and a box there" etc usually. Thats what libs like trolltechs QT, GTK+, MS VB, SDL, etc is for. You do however still have to write what those buttons and widgets DO. And thats done exactly the same way it was done in the 60ies, by CODING. There really is no magic involved here. Yes, we have libraries, but nobody is going to write libs for "everything". If they did, it would be counterproductive by definition.

Programming is like fashion anyway. a few years ago everybody wanted their apps dot Net, now they want web applications. they want XML everywhere next they'll want something else.

Glad to know I'still have a job for around 7.5 years.
As for drag and drop programming there's always Filemaker

next they'll want something else.

I want my MTV

guiguibob80 wrote:Programming is like fashion anyway. a few years ago everybody wanted their apps dot Net, now they want web applications. they want XML everywhere next they'll want something else.

Glad to know I'still have a job for around 7.5 years.
As for drag and drop programming there's always Filemaker

There are some of us who are still programming in Delphi! Had my first taste of C# .Net 3 the other day... I prefer windows apps to xaml.

Meh, real coding is done exclusively in C and that ain't ever changin'

Zicada, you dumbshit.

Visual Studio 2005 is already about 50% of what I described. Drag, drop, poof! Instant business application.

As for the commodization of programming functions, India/China is churning out "programmers" by the hundred thousand. Move up or move out, sucker.

pnwed.

RAD tools have been around for quite some time before Visual Studio 2005. It's really not that simple.

A company I used to work hired a bunch of people in India to rewrite the application I was a part of writing. It's already taken a fair bit longer than we took to write the program and what little they have done appears to be of a fairly poor quality. You pay peanuts and you get peanuts.

Monkeys.

You pay peanuts and you get monkeys.

Which is lucky. If you paid peanuts for more peanuts, all you would have to do the work would be peanuts (which you already had to start with), and peanuts are even worse workers than monkeys. Calorific, but very low-output.

stfu and fix the Toril website.