Exactly. TLDR From the article: Developers must automate their work, and once they do that, designers will be more relevant than they.
An entire article of wishfull thinking.
An entire article of wishfull thinking.
There have been efforts to automate programming, but so far it has proven impossible. That's because programming is almost never rote. It's likely that automating programming is tantamount to inventing a true artificial intelligence. If that happens, the implications extend far, far beyond web design tools.
That's never a rote process for me. Every bit of HTML or CSS I write requires human judgment. Any part that doesn't is handled for me by preprocessors.
I'm guessing that instead of "writing HTML/CSS," you'd have designers meticulously dragging objects and setting properties in a GUI. Isn't that just the same thing with another skin? If I have to click to set a property instead of typing the property in a text file, have I saved myself any work? Have I eliminated the need for some bit of technical knowledge?
> linking together various libraries
Concretely, what sorts of tasks does that entail? Generally there's a few moments to drop the files into the right folder, and a few more to add the appropriate tag(s) to the <head> or the bottom of the bottom of the <body>. How do you eliminate those steps? Or does the user still have to perform them, except in a GUI environment instead of a text editor? If the latter, then I'd argue the same as I did above about HTML and CSS.
Or do you include certain standard libraries by default? If so, that's fine, but the same is achieved in more traditional, text-based frameworks.
> pushing code through processors
Which processors do you have in mind? SCSS and Uglify are quite trivial to run. I wouldn't call that a pain point at all.
> wiring up a basic UI to a database
I'm still not convinced that can be automated beyond the basic interfaces that something like MS Access provides. Which don't cover most use cases. Can you give an example?