He makes some good points. In particular the idea that web sites and other common applications don't need to be hand-crafted at a low level for each individual customer and instead can be built by configuring and combining components with graphical interactive tools.
This type of component-based software development has been available for years. It just hasn't become popular with programmers, because configuring components isn't considered programming since it doesn't involve typing cryptic ASCII code. This is the main issue holding back software development.
Also, the idea that you shouldn't have to write code to position text and graphical elements on a page, I think would be obvious to more programmers if it weren't for the HTML+CSS tradition that has been built up and become ensconced.
You couldn't be more right. We're still working with such low level tools it's embarrassing. The worst part is, I think this is because of a sort of job security mentality. We had real working RAD tools in the 90's (NeXT/Apple enterprise object frameworks). Systems with databases built into the OS in the 80's (AS/400), and so on. But we've abandoned all of those.
>I think would be obvious to more programmers if it weren't for the HTML+CSS tradition that has been built up and become ensconced.
HTML/CSS and in fact the entire web stack is a horrible monster. It's essentially programming in assembly to put dialogs up on a screen. The only real saving grace is reach.
Here's an experiment, put up a modal dialog up in your GUI. One line. Now do the same in a webpage.
This type of component-based software development has been available for years. It just hasn't become popular with programmers, because configuring components isn't considered programming since it doesn't involve typing cryptic ASCII code. This is the main issue holding back software development.
Also, the idea that you shouldn't have to write code to position text and graphical elements on a page, I think would be obvious to more programmers if it weren't for the HTML+CSS tradition that has been built up and become ensconced.