From @garymarcus on BlueSky:
A computer scientist’s perspective on vibe coding:
From @garymarcus on BlueSky:
A computer scientist’s perspective on vibe coding:
Access is the exemplar here. I worked with a few companies that, 20 years ago, produced in-house CRUD ‘applications’ entirely in Access using almost entirely the GUI, with no in-house programmers. You drew the GUI, connected it up to fields in the database, created queries with drag-and-drop, and drew forms to display the results.
Access had the world’s worst branding. It was a surprisingly good RAD tool for business apps, bundled with the world’s worst database. Microsoft sold it as a database. But Access could also work as a front end for SQL Server (which was a fairly good database, even 20 years ago). And that let you scale these business apps up to the requirements of a moderate-sized enterprise.
I think Power Apps are the newest thing in this space from MS. They use the Calc language from Excel and a visual GUI designer. Excel had a reactive programming model before anyone knew that was a thing with a name and now can even use remote SQL databases as a data source. There are a billion people writing programs in Excel.