Is Drag and Drop development a lofty goal?

13Aug/088

Is Drag and Drop development a lofty goal?

Twitter / Nate Kohari: D&D demos hurt the industry…: “”

Nate made a great point on Twitter the other day.

D&D (ed. note D&D = “Drag and Drop”) demos hurt the industry-at-large, because they blow smoke up the asses of non-technical people, and convince them this stuff is easy.

I agree with this statement. People generally come in two flavors when it comes to dealing with computers. Flavor one thinks that everything is hard, flavor two thinks that everything should be easy for the programmer to fix.

But should our industry strive to make drag and drop development a standard? Ensure that D&D generated code is easier to maintain and understand? Ensure that the code generators don’t overwrite out changes? We talk about trying to hit the 80% use case, can we use some kind of visual development to hit that mythical 80% case in development?

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http://blog.rileytech.net Jesse Riley

I’m having this throw-down fight right now as we speak. Old code works with old site, old code does NOT work with new and it’s a TOTAL PITA to figure out why. “They really like that feature” …sigh. Great, wonderful, perfect. Your estimation hours just quadrupled.
http://www.aboutcode.net/ Andrew Davey

How about keeping D&D, but use it to design rich domain objects?
Given enough a “richness” the UI layer can be generated from the domain objects.
http://www.communitymegaphone.com/ G. Andrew Duthie

“People generally come in two flavors when it comes to dealing with computers. Flavor one thinks that everything is hard, flavor two thinks that everything should be easy for the programmer to fix.”

I’m in between. I don’t think *everything* should be easy. But when and where we can, we should move towards abstracting stuff away so we can focus on more important things.

D&D is nothing but an abstraction. Whether it’s the *right* abstraction is certainly open to debate. But the industry has already agreed that abstraction is good, or else we wouldn’t have operating systems, programming languages, compilers, etc.

So by all means, let’s have a discussion about whether particular forms of D&D development are useful abstractions, or cause more trouble than they’re worth. But can we skip the blanket statements maybe?
http://www.lazycoder.com Scott

GAD: I think you’re confusing what I think devs should do with how I think non-developers view computers. In my experience those are the two responses to computer I get from non-developers. It’s either “CAN you change that? Is it hard?” or “Why can’t you just change that?”

FWIW, I want to move towards the Star Trek “Computer: write me a program that does X” model. Or maybe the Star Wars model where the programs write themselves.
http://www.communitymegaphone.com/ G. Andrew Duthie

Fair enough, though I don’t want my computers to write the whole program for me. I actually *like* writing code sometimes.
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Mike

There really is only one flavor. Flavor two. I have not yet met a client who thinks even the most difficult assignments should require more than a few days, start to finish. They wont even consider that there needs to be information gathering and analysis. That there can and WILL be roadblocks and obstacles. That there isnt, no matter what anyone says, a simple one-click installation with our eyes closed and it works that moment.

These people (managers, CEOs, users) are effectively children. They want their instant gratification YESTERDAY and dont care about how we do it because to them, its a game. Its all colors and screens and graphics and sounds and its really: playing. Isnt it? We just play around on the computer all day.

The REAL problem lies with us: the developers. We allow these jackasses to treat us as they do. We should all, collectively, sit back for a couple of says and watch these companies fall apart as their know-it-all managers attempt to write this EASY code.

I have zero respect for people who insist that our job is easy. Some projects ARE simple. Most arent. And I refuse to deliver code on their schedule because it is always way too short. Think ahead middle managers. Lack of planning on your part IS NOT an emergency on mine.
http://ferventcoder.com Robz

@Mike: Unless you are brought in specifically to put out an emergency. Then you should be sure you are compensated as such.
http://ferventcoder.com Robz

Should programming as a skill move towards the way of typists (where everyone can do it, so it’s not specialized)?

I think that is what we are really asking here. And I think we are a long way from that. Of course I, like everyone else who reads this blog, am biased.