
There will be code - nreece
http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2008/08/28/there-will-be-code
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JunkDNA
Early stage computer science research is not an area I'm familiar with, but I
would be curious to know where the current research is headed in terms of
radically rethinking the way we think about and represent code.

That said as an admittedly very naive observer, it would seem to me that it's
very difficult to get away from the basic building blocks we've come to know,
not only from a social standpoint (i.e. several generations of programmers
think in these terms now). But also because the hardware hasn't changed
fundamentally. While capacity and compute speed have gone up, today's
computers still work the same way at their core as their predecessors. The
math they use is the same, the basic components are the same (until memristors
hit the scene I guess). The operations microprocessors can carry out and the
way they need to access data forces you to implement the core of a programming
language a certain way. Once that happens, then all the abstractions on top of
that start to inherit many of those semantics. When you get right down to it,
processors shove binary data around and permute it based on a set of well-
defined mathematical principles. Until they start doing things differently, I
feel like we're "stuck" with those "if" statements (or their logical
equivalents) and all their cousins for a while.

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Zak
I had to look up MDA just to see what it is. It sounds like one of the
technologies people making "enterprise" software would use. It does not sound
like it would actually make software easier to create. That said, I do think
that visual programming languages have merit, but they require the same sort
of logical thought process as any other sort of programming.

What the article seems to be arguing against is that some magical technology
will come along and make it so that programmers aren't needed. I don't think
anything short of human-level AI will do that. COBOL was supposed to do that.

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gengstrand
Remember all those graphical workflow generators such as
<http://www.activevos.com/community-open-source.php> and
[http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/integration/workfl...](http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/integration/workflow/workflow_fov.html)
that were supposed to replace the need for coders? I don't have a problem with
EAI. I think it's great. I just don't agree with the overselling of what EAI
can do.

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ojbyrne
The products we build are quite different. Someone invented GUIs to take up
developer's time. Instead of simple procedural programs that start at the top
and run to the bottom (with some loops and conditions) we have event driven,
multi-window, complex applications.

