This isn't the first time this discussion comes up. Around the year 2000, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) was in its heyday. The idea? Let's create a detailed UML model of our application, run it through a generator and receive the runnable app. No programmers needed anymore. It really got a lot of hype and attention, and it did look promising.
So what happened? Shitty tooling and technical issues aside, there was one crucial problem. The automated generation of a full app without coding required a very detailled input model. So detailed that business people couldn't do it by themselves. Experts were required for handling those properly. Sounds familiar? Yeah, we call those people programmers...
Nowadays it's not called MDA anymore, now it's "low code" or some other buzz phrase. Don't fall for it. Those approaches are doomed to fail for the very same reason MDA failed. Any specification, no matter if it is textual or graphical, which is detailed enough to generate the code of a full application from it, effectively IS code.
I 💯 agree, and perhaps so does the author. But that isn't the topic of discussion here: the author is questioning the nature of our work, not its value.
Any specification, no matter if it is textual or graphical, which is detailed enough to generate the code of a full application from it, effectively IS code.
I think the author agrees with you there, too 😄
The fact that the intentions or behaviors we are trying to transmit are not expressed in a written format using text that does not mean it's not code. We are still coding, we are still translating human desires expressed in human language into something understandable by a computer, even if it is expressed by a higher-order abstraction such as configurations in a more visual editor ... or a conversation with an assistant.
Absolutely. Although my last sentence is intentionally provoking, that's the point.
Too many people think the hard part of software development is writing code. So if you get rid of the "writing code" part, anyone can do it.
The hard part is the thinking that goes along with writing code, and the thinking doesn't go away when you get rid of the "TEXT"
It's always good when we get software-development tools that are better than writing code. But they are software-development tools, and you will want good software developers using them.
In the coming years, we'll se like us, Software Engineers, have new tools at hand to build (not write!) software
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
No, programmers will never become obsolete.
This isn't the first time this discussion comes up. Around the year 2000, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) was in its heyday. The idea? Let's create a detailed UML model of our application, run it through a generator and receive the runnable app. No programmers needed anymore. It really got a lot of hype and attention, and it did look promising.
So what happened? Shitty tooling and technical issues aside, there was one crucial problem. The automated generation of a full app without coding required a very detailled input model. So detailed that business people couldn't do it by themselves. Experts were required for handling those properly. Sounds familiar? Yeah, we call those people programmers...
Nowadays it's not called MDA anymore, now it's "low code" or some other buzz phrase. Don't fall for it. Those approaches are doomed to fail for the very same reason MDA failed. Any specification, no matter if it is textual or graphical, which is detailed enough to generate the code of a full application from it, effectively IS code.
I 💯 agree, and perhaps so does the author. But that isn't the topic of discussion here: the author is questioning the nature of our work, not its value.
I think the author agrees with you there, too 😄
Absolutely. Although my last sentence is intentionally provoking, that's the point.
Too many people think the hard part of software development is writing code. So if you get rid of the "writing code" part, anyone can do it.
The hard part is the thinking that goes along with writing code, and the thinking doesn't go away when you get rid of the "TEXT"
It's always good when we get software-development tools that are better than writing code. But they are software-development tools, and you will want good software developers using them.
In the coming years, we'll se like us, Software Engineers, have new tools at hand to build (not write!) software