As others indicated, CASE was more about code generation rather than smart IDEs. My recollection from the time is that the industry really strongly believed that almost no-one would write actual textual lines of codes and that graphical programming was going to be where it was at.
Looking back, it’s a remarkable delusion: mankind went from pictures to pictograms to text, not in the reverse. The career path everyone expected (mentioned elsethread: go from a junior guy-who-writes-lines to an architect guy-who-draws-pictures) doesn’t really make sense. If anything, while a high-level architectural document needs to have some diagrams, even more than that it needs to have text: text to describe the problem being solved, the context, the potential solutions and the reasons to choose one solution over the rest. Likewise, it’s striking how many PowerPoint slides could be effectively replaced with short point papers … but that’s a discussion for another time.
I am not 100% sure of why the industry had this wrong-headed idea, as I was too young at one point in time and too junior at another to really have good context. Maybe it was the rise of GUIs which led folks to think, ‘gosh, if pictures can enable folks to use a computer easily, then they will enable folks to program a computer easily!’ Or maybe it was the unfortunate habit non-experts have of not really understanding an expert’s field. As I recall, it also had a very strong correlation with the rise of OOP.
Looking back, it’s a remarkable delusion: mankind went from pictures to pictograms to text, not in the reverse. The career path everyone expected (mentioned elsethread: go from a junior guy-who-writes-lines to an architect guy-who-draws-pictures) doesn’t really make sense. If anything, while a high-level architectural document needs to have some diagrams, even more than that it needs to have text: text to describe the problem being solved, the context, the potential solutions and the reasons to choose one solution over the rest. Likewise, it’s striking how many PowerPoint slides could be effectively replaced with short point papers … but that’s a discussion for another time.
I am not 100% sure of why the industry had this wrong-headed idea, as I was too young at one point in time and too junior at another to really have good context. Maybe it was the rise of GUIs which led folks to think, ‘gosh, if pictures can enable folks to use a computer easily, then they will enable folks to program a computer easily!’ Or maybe it was the unfortunate habit non-experts have of not really understanding an expert’s field. As I recall, it also had a very strong correlation with the rise of OOP.