How about a Grand Piano Application that let’s a Novice Play Like Mozart?
Route the Warp Drives to the Food Replicators!
Seriously.
I was reading an article somewhere about how “we don’t need data analysts anymore, we just need tools to do what the analysts do. I’m a developer for a living, and at times have to do data analysis and let’s see we want a tool, maybe a nice little button that will let Shirley Temple:
- Do cubes . . . what what’s a cube
- Do factor analysis
- How about some laymen second derivatives?
- Square Root Transformations for Polticial Science majors
- Show me your item nonresponse while your at it
- What, the fuck, ever
Again, seriously. Do we have to go back to that again? The rational Rose/WebSphere Designer “management and BA’s just put in your objects and an application comes out” bullshit again?
The industry fails, over and over again, to understand progress. Whenever a tool is invented, that is NOT the end. It still takes knowledge and hard work to understand how to use something. And, once that is done, something newer, better, and more complex will be build on top of it.
Progress is advancement towards simplifying complexity; but that does not mean complexity or the brains to understand it ever go away.
It struck me as I looked to all these new San Francisco dot-com ideas being put up with tools like NodeJS and the new UI frameworks that these little apps are nothing more than Palm Pilot executables moved to the web in a different technology. A todo list in HTML 5? GEE! Anything new about that list? Nope.
If we developers are going to be using words about ourselves like “craftsmen” then maybe its high time we look at what that word *really* means: hard work and innovation.
Service busses are boring and dry and don’t write themselves. MVC frameworks have been evolving over years and years and don’t invent themselves. And for every advancement, there’s yet another level of complexity to be uncovered and understood. Businesses that think “well, this is good enough” aren’t around anymore. Evolve, or go extinct.