Well said...:-)
Dixie
> Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:24:02 +0000
> From: bdrun...@gmail.com
> Critcising the aesthetics of programmes produced by RAD tools has often
> been a way in which "professional programmers" have rubbished the useful
> (yet unpolished) tools that literally ran many businesses. The same thing
> happened with Lotus Notes. It was an environment that permitted thousands
> of non-professional programmers (who had the essential knowledge of the
> business processes) to produce and continuously refine the programmes they
> needed to make money.
>
> Out of the box, Lotus Notes managed to provide end-users with access to a
> whole range of features that are even now incredibly hard to find in an IT
> system. From the mid 1980s it had it's own NoSQL database structure; the
> databases could be encrypted; the databases could be replicated between
> clients/servers (or just between servers); one could work offline, or only
> with data on a server; there was field-level access control; it could be
> programmed using the @formula language (really, a list-processing language
> more like LISP than C) or a variant of VisualBasic. An application could
> be built in hours that would take a "professional programmer" months or
> years to build (in order to provide even a subset of the infrastructure a
> Notes network provided).
>
> Even today, I can't think of a programming environment that offers
> professional programmers the range of features that Notes provided to
> non-programming end-users. I worked in companies where out of sheer
> frustration with the IT department taking years to deliver a needed
> application, end-users found the online help in Notes, and taught
> themselves how to use the IDE, and how to program it, and built their own
> applications to solve their business needs.
>
> Lotus Notes was basically destroyed by professional programmers bitching
> about the applications looking ugly. No doubt there are all sorts of
> management issues with coding standards, security, maintainability, etc in
> such an environment. But if a business goes bankrupt because they are
> missing years of money-making opportunities when building something in Java
> or C# takes too long, then niceties like coding standards or the aesthetics
> of an application are almost totally irrelevant.
>
> I've seen case studies where Lotus Notes was viewed as in impediment to a
> business, because it would cost too much to re-engineer those applications
> that ran the business in order to make them buzzword-compliant (never mind
> that the business may well have folded if staff had waited years for a
> professional solution). In a business environment the prime concern has to
> be that the application serves the business, not that it conform to some
> set of non-essential concerns, such as aesthetics.
>
> Bernard
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