On Wednesday, August 05, 2015 12:47:58 PM Alan McKinnon wrote: > Much of what makes programming work has been dumbed down in recent years > so that employable persons without imagination[1] can have jobs and do > something useful. I'm reminded of an old saw about PHP:
It may be that in recent years the trend has made it to the FOSS community, but I'd say it goes to the mid to early 90s with Microsoft's Visual IDEs. By the late 90s you could "write" a Windows GUI application in VisualBasic 6 mostly by drag and drop on the visual designer. With Visual Studio .NET in 2000/1 your could do it for a web application (ASP.NET) as well and you could design a database driven web app without writing a single line of code. In VS2008 they came up with a designer where you write the program by dragging blocks into a flowchart[1]. These tools are nice (at least the ones for GUI apps). I wish we had similar tools of the same quality in the FOSS world. The problem is that you'll get programmers that only know how to drag and drop and when it comes to the 10% of the program that needs to be coded they do a horrible job. 1. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg983474%28v=vs.110%29.aspx -- Fernando Rodriguez
