Yesterday at a pake lecture on AI meets Web 2, Marty Tenenbaum presented a vision of people building their own systems. And it reminded me of a proposal put out by Borland visionaries about 20 years ago. The Borland demo was for a product that would permit “users to build their own spreadsheet program over a long weekend.” Any of your friends build Lotus over the weekend?

Marty laid out a convincing approach, but one that won’t succeed.

Programmers are the only people who have been working tirelessly, relentlessly, even doggedly for 50 years to get out of doing their work. Within five years of there being a programmer, they began working to get out of working.

No CEO, CFO, not any **O tries to work themself out of work.

Programmers are the hardest working lazy people.