Consider this thought experiment.

Imagine that you are a potter in the bowl-making business, but the individual potter’s wheel technology hasn't been invented. Instead what you have to do is write a bowl-turning script in a text editor, email it to China, and then wait for the bowl to be shipped back.

That is actually how we built software in the 1950’s when I got started. Things are only a little better now, and in software we’re still a lot closer to the text-editor end of the spectrum than to the potter’s wheel end.

My goal for software has been to move us toward the potter’s wheel end of the tool-artifact spectrum as much as possible.