Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Coders are a dying breed?

Last week our company Centric held a so-called RAD-race, a one-night competition for developers to show their skills on their favorite development platforms. The technology used by our developers is listed below:
  1. Microsoft C# .Net using Centric proprietary software factory
  2. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 + NinTex
  3. Pronto / Bre4all: Centric proprietary software factory, model driven, 4GL-like
  4. Microsoft LightSwitch
  5. Grails, high-productivity web framework based on the Groovy language
  6. <m_twize>: Centric proprietary software factory, model driven, 4GL-like
  7. Mendix, see website, agile application development without coding
  8. Microsoft C#.Net + NuGet
The assigment consisted of 3 parts:
  1. Develop an application for registering software components
    1. All CRUD functions
    2. Additional processes like alerting owners, requests for change
  2. Add multi-tenancy to the application
    1. Security is important
  3. Add connections to Twitter, Yammer or Facebook
The winning team used SharePoint 2010 with NinTex. Second team used...SharePoint 2010 with NinTex. Third team used Mendix. These teams didn't produce a single line of code!
Our proprietary software factories failed to integrate with social media, but did well for the remainder. The teams using LightSwitch and Grails finished last.

As the one who created the assignment I was really surprised. Can coding no longer keep up with modern development frameworks? We did not perform scientific research nor did we try more complicated tests. But the results made me think.
Let me add a pred-ICT-ion: within 5 years application development will be a practice performed without coding. Coding will be needed to build the frameworks application developers will use and programming will become a high-level profession only a few will attain.