Apex

Re Salesforce's Apex programming language, Patrick Logan is flabbergasted:

Why on earth would anyone invest their information systems in a proprietary hosted language?

If the hosting environment was suited to it and the language sufficiently high-level* (I'm thinking here along the lines of something like Bicicleta, Scratch, or Apple Automator) programs could be extremely short and employed as tactical configuration or customization hooks, rather than strategic "systems programs". Emacs anyone?

I think that web-based, hosted development environments are the future, because they allow outsourcing of many competencies and tedious tasks. (And there's the ray of hope that the browser as a universal canvas will finally crush plain text as a programming medium.) I don't think we should write large programs with them, and hopefully we won't have to.

Adam Bosworth recently remarked that designing Salesforce, they were undecided whether workflow was a neccessary ingredient to the system. And they found out that people were so empowered by Salesforce's semistructured database that workflow was not immediately needed.

* which Apex likely isn't, being badvertised as Java-like

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