Okay. I agree that you could never simplify the creativity of programmers/ computer artist into template. We could try to simply some things to make us more efficient. Websites that allow you to go in, and drag and paste buttons that are editable into your html/ css. Small things like that.
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So the robots won - robots are everywhere. But there are some specific rules they have to follow for the automation they provide to work. Like a dishwasher, thatâs the best example I can think of. If you got asked to build a robot that washes dishes, you might think of something human-like, with hands or whatever. But thatâs stupidly complicated and expensive. Instead, you control the environment the dishes are in. You put them inside a robot that looks like a box, and get the robot to squirt water at them for half an hour or so. And itâs kinda crappy, much less efficient than a person for individual washes. But itâs convenient and more efficient over a long period of time.
So with any computerised solution, normally you try to control the environment it runs in, simplify it to such an extent that you can get the computer to do most of the work. The end result will not be quite as good as if it were crafted, but it will be consistent and convenient. This is an issue when it comes to something that needs to be very finely tuned to be context-specific, often the automation is futile as it turns out to be harder and less useful than just building the thing using a programming language directly. You need to build an application that builds applications.
- GUI tools have at various points in time reached very advanced stages. Delphi, in particular in combination with VCL, is a good example. A large % of people really like what youâre talking about here. The tools work well for a while, then stagnate, then die. They are tied to platforms and platform APIs, and are by their nature they are very complex, and eventually the cost of maintaining them exceeds the benefits. Current stuff: XCode on Mac is a good example. Android Development Studio is another. Xamarin is another. Etc.
- Web sites donât have a huge amount of business value in of themselves. So making something that can be built from a set of components is attractive, & automation is what computers are for.
- But web sites are just a UI for an underlying application. So for the site to work well from a user perspective, the automation tool has to know about how the underlying application works, this is the critical problem, and relates to the robot stuff above.
- JS, and the web platform in general, doesnât allow the level of control that platform-specific tools have access to (Android/IOS/OSX/Windows/Linux/etc).
- To be a successful automation tool, it has to work in a general way - if itâs tied to one specific application you arenât effectively automating anything. Because it needs to know how the underlying application works, this immediately puts a limit on the tool.
- The underlying applications are often extremely varied and based on organisation/business-specific rules.
- There exist systems that automate the human decision making side - theyâve existed for a very long time. However they have the critical problem that building the systems in the first place requires exceptional domain knowledge. And the people best placed to create the systems are in positions where it is a much better use of their time to actually apply that domain knowledge practially rather than creating systems [that have to be maintained and updated constantly] to apply it. See expert systems
tl/dr beyond componant libraries, itâs all great if you want to build 10000 of the same site, but not many people need that, so itâs cheaper and easier to just use a programming language.
Wow okay didnât expect a novel. I agree on that we shouldnât make ourselves useless with robots.
Who said we were building 10,000 of the same website? I lately have been saying in my most recent replies we could do it so its just small stuff that helps to build a website faster.
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Sorry for wall of text. I just keep writing over and over though: if you only mean small stuff you can already do what youâre suggesting, youâve been able to do it for 20 odd years for the web (and for 40 odd years for other GUI stuff). But beyond simple stuff there are significant problems with automation unless you are producing the same website over and over again.
How can you do small stuff like i was talking about already? Is their a store or something that lets you copy and paste code?
Automation could cause a problem i can agree, including hackers. It could also be biased, make certain companyâs sites slower to make them loose profit.
It cost money, doesnât seem bad though.
What is a âmongoâ course? Does it teach on specific skill or like a liberal arts degree and further all of your skills?
A Mongo course is a course that teaches you how to use MongoDB, the database technology preferred by freeCodeCamp 
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You use something like Material Design components, or drop-in widgets/elements built using Web Components. Or you build native apps using Android Studio or XCode. Or at a more basic level, you use Bootstrap or similar. There are multiple competing ways you can just copy paste/drag and drop elements to build a complete site/app very very quickly, with minimal coding if you stay within a very constrained environment.
Oh okay that is cool, i never knew those existed.
@JacksonBates Is MongoDB a whole separate language that is hard to learn? Will i have trouble learning this at my level.
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MongoDb is a database. In my opinion itâs easier than SQL based databases.
The syntax for the objects is basically JSON, so if you know how to manipulate JSON, you already know the basics of how to work with their database objects.
Handling connections and writing to and from the database can be done in any language, so if you learn NodeJS then picking up Mongo is not too hard.
These are all backend technologies which are probably a little safer from the creeping automation / drag and drop website creator worries of this thread.
Docs: Documentation
Cool i just watched 19 minutes of a 30 minute tutorial on it. It is similar to JSON, just as a database. It looks surprisingly more simple then i thought. It follows the same arrays, object structure (mostly), etc.