It's interesting to me that the positive HN response seems to show that programmers do (publicly) like CRUD generators and RAD (rapid application development) but only if there's no front-end. I don't buy that it's actually better without a UI or that you can't make a UI for configuring complex models (it's hard but has been done many times before). But like I said, programmers seem to accept it more readily without…
Actually, in the early days we thought about whether to go text-based or not, for instance going for a boxes-and-lines type of modeling environment. We concluded that for serious modeling, 80% or more of what one does is giving names to concepts, leading to the usage of a lot of text any way. And that boxes-and-lines introduces a lot of 'clutter' which is probably meaningful, but not in a strict enough way to do anyt…
To me, projectional editing is the most sensible type of programming. Unfortunately projectional editors have not had as warm a reception on HN, because programming is narrowly defined by complex text editing. Anything with a UI and programmers are afraid they will be accused of being users. It's dumb, and most won't realize it or admit it, but that's what it comes down to.