Also, what do you guys think of software that generates code for the programmer?

what?

aren't programming languages (some of them at least) already pretty high-level. its not like we're working in machine code or assembly. most Perl programs (and Java and even C++ to some extent and probably python) are reasonably easy to understand if they were written well. what exactly would the user tell the program anyway? "write a program that will validate form data, enter it into a database and send the user an email." i guarantee that it wouldn't work out. for a simple language like HTML (which has no control structures, no variables, just text processing) you could do it (and it has been done), but not for higher-level languages. some routines could be automated, but isn't that the idea of OOP, modules and CPAN?

another point. larry wall's a linguist (or was or knows the stuff or whatever). and he designed Perl to be similar to most natural languages. in order to write a program that automatically generates code, we're delving into some heavy-duty AI.

jeff