[immibis]

That's right. We invented programming AI a very long time ago, and called it an "assembler". All you had to do was tell the assembler what kind of program you wanted, and it would do the programming work for you!

Then we invented another AI to tell the assembler what kind of program you wanted, and called it a "compiler". All you had to do was tell the compiler what kind of program you wanted it to tell the assembler you wanted, and it would do all the not-exactly-programming work for you!

And so on...

[immibis]

P.S. Visual Basic with its GUI designer was a quite effective way to rapidly build apps of questionable quality but great business value. Somebody should bring that paradigm back.

[bruce511]

The paradigm never left :)

My day job is programming in an environment which originated in the mid 90s. A contemporary of the Visual Basic era, but somewhat more powerful, and requiring substantially less code.

While I, and a few thousand others still use it (and it gets updated every couple years or so) it has never been fashionable. Ironically because it's perceived as 'not real programming'.

We routinely build systems with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, much of it founded in the 90s and having been added to for 25 years. Most of it was built, and worked on, by individuals, or very small teams. Much of it today is still active doing the boring business software that keep the lights on.

But its not "main stream" because programmers pick language based on popularity, and enterprises pick programmers based on language. A self-fueling cycle of risk aversion.

A lucky few though hot off the treadmill a long time ago and "followed a path less travelled by". And that has made all the difference.

[hsjsbeebue]

Excellent as long as you jump ship when the complexity is over 5kloc