After the dust settles

Someone asked Hsueh-dou, "What is the living meaning of Zen?" Hsueh-dou replied, "The mountains are high and the oceans are wide." ~Hsueh-dou (from The Little Zen Calendar)

I sometimes think the same is often true for software development: the mountains are high and the oceans, wide. In other words, there are no shortcuts--or if there are, they aren't yet apparent.

I've worked extensively with three "drag-n-drop" environments that purport to simplify programming: GameMaker, The GameFactory 2, and App Inventor. They are wonderful tools, inventive and colorful. And there are others, perhaps many, like them that I have heard about but not tried.

Yet after the dust settles, after we get past syntax and what Brooks (1986) called the "accidents" of software engineering, what remains?

The things that were there in the first place: problem understanding, testing, and debugging which the above tools, as powerful as they are, do not even begin to address.