I was recently browsing Sun’s java site and read the following article which has the title “Writing your first Ruby-on-Rails application.

At this point what you need to do is click on that link and quickly scroll down the page, whats missing? CODE! When did writing an application become a process of creating a database and clicking some buttons? When did we stop coding?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the idea of GUI generators, systems that take all the boredom out of mapping databases to applications and the millions of other systems out there that make our lives as programmers easier, I’m not even trying to take a dig at Ruby here either. It’s just that something about this article worries me, if all we do is point and click where is the innovation going to come from? Are we going to end up in a world where each system is the same as the next?

When i started my professional programming career I got a lot of stick for being a Java coder, you don’t have to deal with memory in depth, don’t have pointers to cope with and have a high quality standard API to build upon, personally I think it was a bit of jealousy that I could code better programs faster but lets not get into that! The fact is simple java does hide some of the hard stuff away, C++ hides away some of the hard stuff that people dealing with assembly cope with, but is the point and click application going too far?

Maybe its me finding it hard to embrance some of these new technologies, i just wonder if we reduce the complexity too far we will easily be able to generate the same application time and time again but loose our ability to innovate and adapt to a changing environment.