[Freddy]

New research could enable computer programming based on screen shots, not just code.

Excerpt :

Until the 1980s, using a computer program meant memorizing a lot of commands and typing them in a line at a time, only to get lines of text back. The graphical user interface, or GUI, changed that. By representing programs, program functions, and data as two-dimensional images — like icons, buttons and windows — the GUI made intuitive and spatial what had been memory intensive and laborious.

But while the GUI made things easier for computer users, it didn’t make them any easier for computer programmers. Underlying GUI components is a lot of computer code, and usually, building or customizing a program, or getting different programs to work together, still means manipulating that code. Researchers in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab hope to change that, with a system that allows people to write programs using screen shots of GUIs. Ultimately, the system could allow casual computer users to create their own programs without having to master a programming language.

Story : MIT News...

[lrh9]

Isn't this just WYSIWYG for desktops?

[Art]

Perhaps, but It is the ultimate dumbing down of computer programming. The lazy man's dream..."if I could only get that durn computer to..." <whatever>.  For the person who knew what they'd like but had no inkling of how to create something like it.

Just copy or create an image, drag / drop a piece of text or assign a value and bingo...instant program.

And for this, the computers will require more memory, faster CPU cycles, etc.

Back in the early days of programming, we had a small program that was more of a tool. It would go through one's program and toss out all unneeded items like extra spaces, certain text and punctuation, line numbers, etc. until the program was reduced to just that...a streamlined, efficient, much faster program.

Now that memory is so common and readily available, programmers have, over the years, gotten sloppy with their code, not bothered about extra remarks / comments, spacing, etc.

So the programs still run and the computer handles it but imagine what could really happen. Just some thoughts.

[Freddy]

Yes, I had a similar reaction.  I think I will always prefer hand coding things.  When I first started with website design I played around with a range of GUI WYSIWYG editors.  It's only now years later that I realise what an awful job they do of coding things - I think it was Net Objects Fusion that I really began to detest because it was hell trying to customise the code it produced.

They also do a bad job of making standards compliant code, XHTML etc...   I am a lot happier writing the code, I can do whatever I want.

I don't like the dumbing down either and agree that this all results in inefficient code and sloppy programming.  Good code should read like a book - if you know it well enough - I know that is probably very nerdy, but it's an extremely useful skill to look at a page of code and be able to see what it will do without running it every five minutes.

Rant over 

[lrh9]

I'm a little more ambivalent. While there are software performance requisites, ultimately computers exist to serve their users. Given a choice between software systems computers can run optimally but people cannot understand, or software systems that computers cannot run optimally but people can understand, I have to choose the latter rather than the former.

[Randy]

Somehow this seems like something I heard back in the early eighties although it wasn't picture driven but the idea was that by answering a few questions and connecting the modules, one could program an accounting system without a single line of code. There may be a slight exaggeration but the ads in Computer Weekly back then seemed to be saying that.

Twenty years later and coding is more complex than ever. I remember a time when a supervisor asked me to teach a class about something called "smart objects". Screens that could be reused along with tables and such. I asked, "How often does one reuse a customer entry screen or an invoice maintenance screen?" But the smart object was a GUI module connected to a database module connected to table modules... in the end the resulting code was slow and fourteen pages long. I did the same thing in about three quarters of a page with an editor. It was much faster and of course easy to understand.

Like any good seasoned programmer, I like to be able to read and understand what will happen.

Randy