So, professional software engineers of EC, what do you think about having end users doing software development work? By end users, I'm talking about essentially non-technical people, or people of a low technical ability. So, we might have them doing things like creating/changing XML schemas or whatever. Is this a good idea?
I had always the notion that SQL and the like can be used by end-user, since what u basically need is a bit of math and to know what u want to do with your DB, although I might be the only one with that notion! For general-purpose programming - I dont think its a good idea since u need some experience with programming to make it effecient, debuggable, and readable by others, like any other thing that u need experience to achieve a greater result .. thats my thought of it ^^
Depends on the user. Some might do well with a GUI, and someone who writes Excel formulas might do OK (that's a minority, though). But scripting or programming? It's hard enough getting some admins to write scripts or SQL, much less a non-technical person.
Thanks for your responses. It seems like you folks kind of agree with me, that having end users do more of the technical side of things can get problematic. My organization has decided apparently that it's acceptable to have the end users write XML schemas for our forms... I think this is a stupid idea, so naturally, that's exactly what we're doing.
Personally, I vomit whenever I hear "XML schemas" and "write" in the same sentence. XML, IMHO, is a great markup language for computers to generate and interpret. Once you put a human in either of those roles, all hell breaks loose!
I did some work with hacking and such for lab, I think its one of the things i targeted, being able to write that kind of thing. I don't remember for sure, but I think its a security flaw. XML headers i think it was? Something along those lines allowed me to inject my own payload and leak data from the server. All the more reason to avoid it I guess
