Is programming getting any simpler?

Earlier this month, I answered to a poll on Code Project about programming simplicity and the related trend.

Although one could think that technology innovation should exist to make our life simpler, including our life as a developer, the answer statistics I got by answering showed that almost two times more developers tend to think that programming will get more complex than those who think that programming will get simpler.

Option	%
Programming will become extremely simple	4.83
Programming will become simpler	10.19
Specifics will change but overall the complexity of the job will stay the same	55.58
Programming will become more complex	14.27
Programming will become so complex that further specialisation in skills will be needed	15.13
Total	100%

In fact, at SoftFluent, we have made the observation on the programming field that complexity is winning over simplicity. What is instructive with this poll though, it is that developers perceive this as the long term trend.

In our analysis, many CASE tools brought simplicity in the client-server space in the early 90s, but since the explosion of the web and rich user interfaces, it has been very difficult for these tools to cope with technology innovation pace and provide the same level of simplicity. Indeed, building an editing tool for a technology that deeply mix user interface with business code (such as HTML, Ajax, XAML, etc.) is a real challenge. WYSIWYG? For a web site developer, what you see is *never* what you get…

And since people quite have abandoned the idea of using CASE tools and returned to lower level programming languages such as Java or C#, it seems that each new technology wave brings a lot of challenges to the developer, not to mention the difficulty of making the relevant choices. Remember last year’s announcement from Microsoft on how LightSwitch was supposed to make Silverlight development a child play… right before Microsoft deemphasizes the Silverlight platform this year to the benefit of HTML5!

Furthermore, with the BUILD conference behind us, we even have more options for developing Windows applications:

And still, this picture is clearly simplified:

• See Doug Seven’s blog post about a more accurate picture,
• Note that this is not covering web options such as ASP.NET webforms, MVC or Silverlight
• Remember that we are just talking about the Windows platform!

In the end, this lets a lot of possible options and risks up to the customer who needs to invest in technology.

So this is crystal clear for us that programming is getting more and more complex these days, and that there is a huge need for simplification through methods and tools that build on top of those underlying layers.

This is what we have been up to over the past years, and we still have a lot of work ahead of us before developers check the first box of CodeProject’s survey.

Daniel COHEN-ZARDI, SoftFluent CEO