Also, if there is going to be a visual software development revolution, I think it will look something like a visual data flow language. Something along the lines of yahoo pipes meets rails or django.
How it would work is you would have something like ActiveRecord that can pull data into the first step, then visual steps for mapping, calculating, etc.. and spitting that data into a HTML view or whatever in the last step. You could design the HTML in a WYSIWYG kind of thing or just as a tempting system. Doesn't matter.
All it would be doing would be replacing a lot of the computation that programmers do with some functional lego block able logic in the middle. Once you had the mechanisms in place for this kind of system, I think you could swap out the data sources from a CSV file to a database to a restful service, and your design bits from HTML to iOS or whatever pretty easily, giving you the ability to work in a pretty general purpose way.
A tool like that could be very interesting, but it's quite a different approach.
How it would work is you would have something like ActiveRecord that can pull data into the first step, then visual steps for mapping, calculating, etc.. and spitting that data into a HTML view or whatever in the last step. You could design the HTML in a WYSIWYG kind of thing or just as a tempting system. Doesn't matter.
All it would be doing would be replacing a lot of the computation that programmers do with some functional lego block able logic in the middle. Once you had the mechanisms in place for this kind of system, I think you could swap out the data sources from a CSV file to a database to a restful service, and your design bits from HTML to iOS or whatever pretty easily, giving you the ability to work in a pretty general purpose way.
A tool like that could be very interesting, but it's quite a different approach.