[toss1941]

I'm with the "or it already has been". Automation is always happening with programming. Fully automatic programming has no meaning, since you have to define parameters for some set of algorithms to act upon. Once you define parameters, you are already using automation because today we can already with a single line effectively "open file x for appending, and create it if it doesn't exist" and thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code will execute behind the scenes to make this happen.

[mdpopescu]

This reminds me of the time when I saw the C code required to display a window in Windows, with all the things we've come to expect from one (close "x", system menu and so on). At the time (Windows 95 I think) it was around 80 lines of code.

I was surprised because in Delphi 2 that was a File / New Form followed by a Show or something like that... I never even thought of the API calls required to do all that.