For the past decades.... ever since widespread desktop computing became the norm... there have been an endless supply of efforts to make programming available to non-programmers.
The very earliest Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc spreadsheets were an effort to do so. LightSwitch looks to be yet another effort in a long line of failed efforts to take the programmer out of programming.
Yet... no matter what you try to do..... it always requires programming skills to create a usable end product.
There is no substitute for analyzing a situation and understanding it and programming a solution.
Every effort to pretend that that you can somehow prefab all-possible-applications for the non-programmer... always ends up with another programming language being developed.
Using spreadsheets as an example....
Working to develop a spreadsheet application that is more complex than an expensive "paper tape calculator substitute".. requires the user to know the "programming language" that the formulas and formatting commands constitute.
Pretty much every formula in the spreadsheet language are duplicates of ones found in Basic, QuickBASIC, VisualBasic, QBasic, COBOL, RPG, Fortran, Pascal, C, and so on. Same thing with the formatting.
Any programming language above Assembler has these features.. and every piece of software designed to circumvent the need to learn programming ends up requiring one to learn another programming language dialect.
Large bloated companies... the bureaucratic kind with huge programming staffs of rote coders... are forever trying to develop and sell products to a naive user public by claiming that somehow a software purchase will save them the bother of learning something difficult and complicated.
Yet... the software purchased.., always ends up requiring them to learn something difficult and complicated.
LightSwitch looks about like RPG II with a GUI. It seems it might as well be named VisualRPG. Goodness knows how many zillion programming hours went into reinventing this wheel by programing teams who probably think they dreamed up something original.
Giant organizations that are the equivalent of gray-goo are the least likely place for anything original to originate.
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