Programming - 4

In the process of learning Apache Struts for a large project at work, I have discovered Safari. This online bookshelf, created by O'Reilly and some other technical book vendors, allows me to checkout books to be read in a web browser instead of having to buy stacks of paper books.

Some of you already know about my love affair with jEdit. I've also started writing Java/SWT applications in Eclipse. Recently, a friend convinced me to try JSP and Netbeans.

Recently on Slashdot there have been many discussions on the death of programming. The main focus of these discussions seem to be improved graphical tools for programming and how they will render programmers obsolete. I agree that improved graphical tools allow end users tosolve some problems themselves. However this argument completely ignores, as many who do programming will notice, that programming often involves abstract concepts that are not easily expressed in a graphical form.