Around 1981, in the early days of Personal Computer World, one of the very early UK personal computer magazines, there was an article which it seems I will never forget. The journalist excitedly expounded on a new application that was being written, called "The Last One", or TLO. The idea was that the application understood a business requirement expressed in English, thereby making all other application development languages/systems redundant.

Safe to say, we're still not there yet.

P.S. also in PCW, a great magazine in its day, was another article about a program that could keep compressing files repeatedly to make them really small. I haven't see that yet, either.