Life in General

 Anyhow, then came machine code when programmers were able to use HEX 1 thru F. After that it was assembler coding when mnemonics were developed, so programmers could use such instructions as JPNZ (that is on the Zilog 8080, I think) which was a branching instruction and stood for Jump When Not Zero. IBM 360 mnemonics were typically more cryptic so that M stood for MOVE rather than the MOV favoured by 8080. But no one denied that this was an advancement and easier cf a series of 1's and 0's. 3GL's like Fortran and COBOL were significantly easier than mnemonics and 4GL's/CASE Tools like IEF (the only one that I am familiar with) made application development (as opposed to pure programming) even simpler. For example, developing a CICS screen was way quicker in IEF compared to doing it in COBOL/CICS Command Language. I'd like to digress and say that CICS command language itself was a big step forward from CICS Macro level programming. And when IEF/Composer/Cool:GEN introduced GUI development tools, it provided an opportunity for existing developers of Block Mode (i.e. green screen) applications a bridge to client server development without major retooling. Similarly VB did the same thing for non mainframe development, didn't it? It made it so much quicker to create a GUI based app with database access- a huge improvement over using BASICA and QBasic. It spawned the likes of PB and even Access development. Alas, along came Java and Web development and I feel application development took a major step backward. Someone developing apps for the web these days using JEE needs just so many skills- Java to begin with, then Javascript, JSP, frameworks like Struts or JSF or whatever, other frameworks like Spring, technologies like Hibernate and JLog and the list goes on. (Not to forget good ole SQL) An IDE like Eclipse is so busy compared to the old VB! There are just so many bits and pieces. Isn't this regressive? I mean, shouldn't it become easier to develop and deploy applications as computer technology progresses? Java and .NET developers look down on VB apps as procedural and non portable and so on forgetting the obvious- they served a purpose, mainly to satisfy user requirements in a quick and pleasing fashion.