Dumbing Down Programming?

RunRevKev writes "The unveiling of Revolution 4.0 has sparked a debate on ZDNet about whether programming is being dumbed down. The new version of the software uses an English-syntax that requires 90 per cent less code than traditional languages. A descendant of Apple's Hypercard, Rev 4 is set to '...empower people who would never have attempted programming to create successful applications.' ZDNet reports that 'One might reasonably hope that this product inspires students in the appropriate way and gets them more interested in programming.'"

Comments

Time to read "No Silver Bullet" again

[turing_m]

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SoftwareEngineering/BrooksNoSilverBullet.html

Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats

[Simetrical]

It doesn't really matter in the web as 90% of the time is spent hitting the database.

Depends on the application. Wikipedia is much more CPU-bound than database-bound. Look at the database (db*) vs. application (srv*) servers lists here: there are at least five times as many app servers as DB servers, at a quick glance. A typical request that hits the backend spends (IIRC) tens of milliseconds in the database, hundreds in PHP. Try formatting 500 or 5000 rows of a table when each one takes 1 ms – because yes, that happens when you try writing nice abstract formatting stuff in PHP.

The website I administer is also much more CPU- than database-bound. Generating the front page of the forums is 602 ms, with only 14 ms in MySQL and the rest in PHP. This is a >20G database, by the way.

I really don't see how any typical web app could spend more than a few tens of milliseconds per request at the database, unless it's poorly written (too much/too little normalization, bad indexes, etc.). But it's very easy to do hundreds of ms of pure computation in a slow language like PHP, even if your code is well-written. Are most web apps really DB-bound? I just haven't seen it, personally.