Model driven development interview on .NET rocks

They had a very interesting interview of a guy called Chris Sells on the .NET rocks podcast. He was talking about a model driven way of developing software that (as I understood it) was about being able to tell the computer what you want it to do without needing to tell it how to do it.

When I was listening to the interview I couldn’t help thinking that this was a bit like communism. It might be a great idea in theory for the far distant future, but I don’t think that we’re quite ready for it now. We can’t even really communicate that clearly with each other about what we want a computer system to do (why isn’t there a sitcom about a guy getting functional specifications wrong?) so how can we expect to have that sort of a conversation with a machine that isn’t flexible enough to read my handwriting?

I did like what he was saying about each step we take with programming adding another level of abstraction. I supposed we wouldn’t be able to do most the things we can do today if we didn’t. It is pretty amazing that with a few lines of javascript code I can query another computer on the internet, download information to the client machine and display it to a user. I don’t need to worry much about memory or packets or communicating with the network card or even rendering the pixels to the screen. It would have taken me an incredible amount of time longer to write my first hello world ajax script if I did.. :)

I wonder if in the future they’ll brag about not needing to worry about things like loops and imports and objects and if the real scary, geeky low-level guys will be the ones writing the kind of code that we love so much today. It’s going to be fun watching the industry gradually changing into whatever abstraction makes things easier for us next.