Compiled Applications Headed for Extinction?
"Compiled applications are dying. They are being ripped apart, piece by piece, until there's almost nothing left... and it's a good thing. In their place, a new class of execution engines is emerging. These engines can power any kind of application, from spreadsheets to supply chains, and all they need to work their magic is a few lines of structured text. While this trend started at the periphery of applications with functions such as User Interfaces and Data access, it is now migrating to the core of application functionality: business processes, algorithms, semantics, and state. Software will never be the same...
My argument is not that compiled code is going away completely, but that the code that makes an application distinct (business logic and presentation logic, config parameters, etc.) is indeed migrating to XML. Some of this "code" is simply using XML as a flexible container and is loaded and compiled at runtime anyway, but the point remains, the "code" that makes an application unqiue is being seperated out into XML, while what is left behind are generic execution engines that manage the low level tasks such as security, performance, integration, state, etc.
Finally, I am not suggesting that just because "code" is migrating to unstructured text that it will be much easier to program applications, but such migration does make code more flexible and accessible which is similar to what HTML did to the presentation layer. Perhaps this trend is not yet evident in Windows development tools, but it seems to be elsewhere."
From Burnham's Beat: The Death of Compiled Applications and the related comments.
