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Hey man, I'm a zen buddhist, I know about the balance and the tradeoffs. I'm also a realistic optimist, and you're right, it's necessary but often fruitless. But the way I see it, we're headed in that direction pretty surely. Ten years ago we couldn't imagine software doing anything different from Excel, and Excel (or, er, Lotus 123) was the most powerful way to solve any problem, and they were indeed amazing. But they have this problem of being unstructured. Now we have Rails and other frameworks that make it easier to make custom logic to solve problems in specific controlled ways. They're making it easy to let programmers specify how a tool works. We're in the woodworking and craftsman stage of software: we need people who can build the tools and painstakingly design every detail. We may always need that, and we may always value it. But I can envision a future where there's some in-between: some way to let the computer be extremely smart about the problems we're trying to solve with these tools. I think frameworks like Rails are one giant leap away from being usable not by programmers, but by people just illustrating rules and relationships. Would it be too generic? Would the tradeoffs be too great? Maybe. But I am optimistic these are problems we can solve and not great unsurmountable rules of the universe. I know because I did it once. I made something that worked for everyone and allowed you to define complex multi-dimensional relationships between data. It would cover almost any business need, and in a stricter smarter way than excel. There were details that we missed and my business partner was an asshole; those were the problems. The software and the idea were sound and, in fact, incredible. I think the trivial problems are solvable. So, forgive me my optimism, but it's based on experience. |