Comments on: Programmerless programming is just a mirage

By: Andrew Westberg

Andrew Westberg — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:16:35 +0000

Yeah. I’ve used systems like that in the past. Wasn’t very fun. COBOL was one of the early attempts at business people doing programming. Quite a lot of unsupportable spaghetti code still out there using COBOL.

By: Scot Mcphee

Scot Mcphee — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:56:34 +0000

Yeah Robert that might be an even faster filter to rejecting the technology! The problem is of course it’s CTOs or other no-longer-or-never-coding types who are making these decisions to use this technology. Usually aided by a nice lunch from some clueless sales rep or pre-sales architect of the vendor.

None of these guys – even if at some point in the past they used to actually, you know, program anything – have coded in a “modern” environment where things like /bin/sh command-line (although that is a 1970s technology of course!), continuous integration builder servers, and test-first principles apply.

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:12:26 +0000

Hah! Screw unit testing. The very first question I have with new tools like that is “can I do a build from the command line, so that I can build on my build server instead of my desktop”

Every one of those tools I’ve seen so far has the answer as “no”. BEA’s WebLogic Workshop at least had an “export as ant” option – all that did was fire up the Workshop and drive it somehow. Not so good on a headless server, and the 50-second wait time for the Workshop to start was pretty annoying.

Also, have you seen what those tools produce when you start to put in error handling logic? *shudder*