HACKER Q&A
📣 Austin_Conlon

Why do some software engineers dislike visual tooling?


Why do some software engineers dislike visual tooling?


  👤 websitescenes Accepted Answer ✓
Too much clicky, clicky for something that could be scripted. It's the main reason I always roll my own CMS instead of using something like Wordpress. Bloated/confusing interfaces can be cumbersome and actually slow an engineer down quite a bit.

👤 gvb
What you can do is limited by the imagination of whoever wrote the tool (or worse, with "enterprise" tools, the imagination of the committee that wrote the requirements).

Non-gui tools are generally much more "open-ended" - you are limited by your imagination, not someone else's imagination.

----

Clicky-gui tools make simple things trivial but make complex things impossible.

Non-gui tools make simple things harder but make complex things possible.


👤 brigandish
Probably because it's rarely portable. Or, at least, it was that way in the past. MS products of the late 90's/early 2000's come to mind. Since then I've relied as much as possible on plain text.

Once bitten, twice shy… though I secretly dream of writing decent code with help from a something graphical.