The Dream of Coding Without Coders: A History of a Persistent Promise =====================================================================

by Marios Karagiannis
May 19, 2025

For as long as software has existed, there have been promises, often
grand, sometimes naive, that the need to "know how to code" would
soon vanish. The vision: ordinary people, business analysts, or even
executives designing powerful applications without writing a single
line of code. From the earliest days of computing to today's AI
revolution, this dream has been revived again and again. Yet, despite
billions in investments and waves of hype, the core of software
development, the logic, structure, and abstraction, remains
stubbornly human.

The 1960s: COBOL and the Business User
======================================

In the 1960s, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was created
to make programming accessible to business people. With its
English-like syntax, COBOL was supposed to bridge the gap between
domain experts and machine code. The dream was clear: managers and
analysts would write software themselves.

But COBOL, while more readable than assembly, still required
training, structure, and logical thinking. The dream didn't
materialize. COBOL coders,still in demand decades later, became their
own specialized workforce. Instead of removing the need for
programmers, COBOL expanded the profession.

The 1980s-90s: 4GLs and Visual Tools
====================================

Fourth-Generation Languages (4GLs) promised another leap. Tools like
Fox Pro, Power Builder, and Oracle Forms let users "draw"
applications. Visual Basic allowed developers to build GUIs with
drag-and-drop components. At the time, these were seen as the end of traditional coding.

But while these tools simplified UI creation and database binding,
complex business logic still required real coding. The abstraction
broke down quickly as projects grew. Power users emerged, but
professional developers remained essential.

The UML Era: Modeling as Programming?
=====================================

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Unified Modeling Language
(UML) was heralded as the new foundation for software development.
Why write code, the thinking went, when you could diagram it? With
Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), one could draw class and activity
diagrams and automatically generate applications from them.

Despite heavy support from enterprise vendors, this approach never
took off at scale. Software is not just structure; it's behavior, and
behavior is messy. Diagrams became too complex, brittle, and
incomplete to replace real code. UML found a niche in documentation
and architecture, but the coder was not dethroned.

The No-Code/Low-Code Renaissance
================================

In the 2010s, a new generation of no-code and low-code platforms
emerged: Bubble, Out Systems, Mendix, and others. These platforms
boasted intuitive interfaces for building web apps, workflows, and integrations. This time, the audience expanded to entrepreneurs and
startups.

While successful for prototyping, internal tools, or constrained
domains, these platforms hit a wall when it came to scalability,
customization, and maintainability. Developers were still needed to
extend functionality, ensure security, and keep performance in check.
Once again, the promise remained only partially fulfilled.

Now: AI Will Replace Coders?
============================

The latest iteration of the promise centers around artificial
intelligence. Tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude can
write code, refactor it, explain it, and even suggest solutions.
Surely now, many claim, AI will finally eliminate the need to know
how to code.

But even AI doesn't remove the core challenge of software
development: understanding what needs to be built, translating that
into logical structure, and debugging edge cases. AI is a powerful tool--perhaps the most powerful yet--but it is a copilot, not a
captain. It accelerates developers, it doesn't replace them. Just as calculators didn't eliminate the need to understand math, AI won't
eliminate the need to understand code.

Why the Dream Won't Die--and Why It Won't Come True ===================================================

The repeated promises share a common mistake: underestimating what
software development actually is. Coding is not just syntax; it's problem-solving, system design, abstraction, trade-offs, and
communication. Each time we try to automate or abstract it away, we
rediscover how central human reasoning is to the process.

Software is not a commodity product. It's a living, changing
expression of intent. Until we can automate intent, and all the
ambiguity, creativity, and complexity it entails, there will always
be a place for coders.

From: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dream-coding-without-coders- history-persistent-marios-karagiannis-h18he>

--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Tue, 18 Nov 2025 20:59:50 -0000 (UTC), Ben Collver wrote:

The UML Era: Modeling as Programming?
=====================================

No mention of the very-high-level language era? Perl was an early pioneer, also TCL and Python, even PHP. This allowed people with fairly modest computing skills to write some useful applications, and the trend
continues through to the present day, if anything, more strongly than
before.

In the 2010s, a new generation of no-code and low-code platforms
emerged: Bubble, Out Systems, Mendix, and others.

Never heard of any of them. Must be proprietary -- i.e. dead ends.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 18 Nov 2025 21:19:03 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

There also are outright visual programming languages.

The dataflow paradigm can be quite popular here. Example: implementation
of Alan Turing?s reaction-diffusion model for growth and differentiation
of biological systems <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSpkkuOOtBw>.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2025-11-18, Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Still, some things /have/ gotten easier. I have a reader and
writer for PNG files in Python. But it did not handle palettes
(technically, color type 3)! So I told the chatbot to add this.
Both the reader (191 lines) and the writer (90 lines) ran
correctly immediately. No need to debug! The three PNG files
I just posted here (with just 34, 11, and 12 KBytes only)?
They all were encoded with it! The last one with a palette.

But did the AI "write" that code, or did it just copy/paste someone
elses work?

--
Ian

"Tamahome!!!" - "Miaka!!!"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 18/11/2025 21:19, ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de wrote:

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote or quoted:

Why write code, the thinking went, when you could diagram it?

There also are outright visual programming languages. See [1].

But even AI doesn't remove the core challenge of software
development: understanding what needs to be built.

Yeah, see [2].

Writing prompts for a chatbot /is/ programming. So, there still
are "coders".

Writing prompts for a chatbot is specification. That probably explains why
opinions on using AIs as programming aids vary so much.

Still, some things /have/ gotten easier. I have a reader and
writer for PNG files in Python. But it did not handle palettes
(technically, color type 3)! So I told the chatbot to add this.
Both the reader (191 lines) and the writer (90 lines) ran
correctly immediately. No need to debug! The three PNG files
I just posted here (with just 34, 11, and 12 KBytes only)?
They all were encoded with it! The last one with a palette.

[1]

.--------------------------------------------.
| .---------------. |
| | .----. | |
| | ->| | | |
.-------. | | | <= | -> | |
[] --->| qsort |---> [] | | x ->| | | |
'-------' | | '----' | |
| '---------------' |
| | |
| v .---. |
| .------. .-------. | | |
.---------------. | xs -->| grep | ->| qsort | --->| | | >| .---. | | '------' '-------' | j | | >| x -->| | | .-------. | .------. | o | | >| | : | -> |-->| qsort | ->| x --->| list | --------------->| i | --> | >| xs ->| | | '-------' | '------' | n | | >| '___' | | .------. .-------. | | | >'---------------' | xs -->| grep | ->| qsort | --->| | |
| '------' '-------' | | |
| ^ '---' |
| | |
| .---------------. |
| | .----. | |
| | x ->| | | |
| | | < | -> | |
| | ->| | | |
| | '----' | |
| '---------------' |
'--------------------------------------------'

[2]

|The hardest single part of building a software system is
|deciding precisely what to build.
Brooks, F.P. Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software
Engineering, Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1995, Second Edition.

--
--
A PICKER OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES

--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:25:07 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

Writing prompts for a chatbot is specification.

?Specification? is a human writing instructions for consumption by another human.

Writing instructions for consumption by a machine is ?programming?.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 20 Nov 2025 09:58:16 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

| Request:
|
|Write a Python program to print 1, 3, 5, etc.

for i in "1", "3", "5", "etc." :
print(i)

Or even

print("1, 3, 5, etc.")

How literal do you want to be?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.1
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)