And there's been the business process engine craze in between. BPEL comes to mind which also has 'visual editors' for the business people to use.
It's too complex for them and the you pay Software engineers to use BEPL instead. Which is just a worse language to actually program in than the underlying system.
Or any other number of 'process engines' which give you a worse language to describe your actual process in and then you need to do stupidly convoluted things to do simple things. But hey, we didn't have to code!
I worked on a Pega project once. There was nothing in there that the business people would be able to touch, especially after the requirements exceeded the capabilities of Pega’s primitives. One of the local friendly FTEs (the dev work was contracted out) would’ve been happy to use C#/ASP.Net web forms like everything else in the org.
It's too complex for them and the you pay Software engineers to use BEPL instead. Which is just a worse language to actually program in than the underlying system.
Or any other number of 'process engines' which give you a worse language to describe your actual process in and then you need to do stupidly convoluted things to do simple things. But hey, we didn't have to code!