My kid could code that

Imagine what it must be like to be an abstract-expressionist painter. You spend countless hours slaving over the canvas, applying all your creative talents and academic training to produce the truest expression of your painterly art, only to hear some gallery patron whisper, "My kid could do that." Oh, but wait -- we don't have to imagine, because that's exactly what we, as developers, get all the time. It certa

Imagine what it must be like to be an abstract-expressionist painter. You spend countless hours slaving over the canvas, applying all your creative talents and academic training to produce the truest expression of your painterly art, only to hear some gallery patron whisper, "My kid could do that."

Oh, but wait -- we don't have to imagine, because that's exactly what we, as developers, get all the time. It certainly doesn't help when we have representatives from major tools vendors telling us that high school kids could do our jobs.

Here's Todd Fast, Sun Microsystems' chief architect of enterprise Java tools, speaking at the recent JavaOne conference: "The definition of applications is changing, the common perception of applications is changing. As we see abstractions go up, we see more people able to participate, able to create applications."

There's a familiar idea. From batch files to scripting languages, CORBA to JavaBeans, 4GLs to drag-and-drop developer GUIs, tools vendors for years have heralded an age when programming is a thing of the past and computing is as effortless as riding a bike. But when Fast claims as a core principle that "high school and college students will take over your job," then goes on to assert that "engineers are an endangered species," I call merda taurorum.

Fast's thesis? Basic supply and demand. "There aren't enough of us [engineers] to actually produce the cool stuff that people want," he says. Traditional end-users, the so-called casual developers, will naturally rise to the occasion, filling in the gaps with mashups, widgets, and other Web 2.0 confections. The role of traditional developers will be to build platforms that "enable anyone to build applications on top."

But if engineers aren't building all that "cool stuff," it's probably because they're all busy doing actual work. Let's get real; I love diving into all the latest developer gizmos as much as the next guy, but three mashups, two RIAs (rich Internet applications), four RSS feeds, and a dashboard do not an enterprise application make.

People like Fast should talk to my pal Ted sometime. Ted is the manager of a Web-based application at a major health maintenance organization. When Ted's application doesn't work the way it should, patients and health care providers across an entire state have a hard time ordering durable medical supplies -- think wheelchairs, portable defibrillators, and oxygen tanks.

Ask Ted where he'd rank adding AJAX to his application on the list of deliverables for his next release cycle. Go on, ask him. Then describe for me the expression that moves across his face. You could write a haiku about it.