It's bad for everyone involved because the programmer loses the ability to make decisions about how to structure the program he/she is working on, and the manager and/or business analyst waste lots of time worrying about intricate technical details of someone else's job, when they should be tending to their own responsibilities. It's a violation of separation of concerns and a disrespect for the software developer's domain expertise.
The trend I have seen in enterprise software is that, because good software developers are expensive and in high demand, the business attempts to commoditize them by having lower paid, semi-technical staff (like business analysts) do everything except for write the actual code, limiting the developer's job description to simply translating a diagram and a list of features and business rules into Java--like some sort of human compiler.
That approach is doomed to produce terrible software forever, because you can't write good software without thinking deeply and understanding both the problem to be solved and the tools available to solve it. And you just can't commoditize a job that requires that much thinking.
On the other hand, I do agree that software development needs to be made easier than it currently is. It is currently very hard because the current tools we have are built on layers upon layers of leaky abstractions that still require a highly trained and experienced individual to understand first, in order to be productive. Making programming languages more easily comprehensible to humans, is a big part of that. Programming languages are for humans, after all.
The trend I have seen in enterprise software is that, because good software developers are expensive and in high demand, the business attempts to commoditize them by having lower paid, semi-technical staff (like business analysts) do everything except for write the actual code, limiting the developer's job description to simply translating a diagram and a list of features and business rules into Java--like some sort of human compiler.
That approach is doomed to produce terrible software forever, because you can't write good software without thinking deeply and understanding both the problem to be solved and the tools available to solve it. And you just can't commoditize a job that requires that much thinking.
On the other hand, I do agree that software development needs to be made easier than it currently is. It is currently very hard because the current tools we have are built on layers upon layers of leaky abstractions that still require a highly trained and experienced individual to understand first, in order to be productive. Making programming languages more easily comprehensible to humans, is a big part of that. Programming languages are for humans, after all.