Why, though, do most application programmers, no matter what platform they work on, use legacy programming practices to get their work done?
The rare programmer who is drawn to task automation usually ends up working in systems programming or system administration. Application programmers are expected to use legacy programming practices, and since line managers are rarely familiar with task automation, they don’t encourage it or reward it. So for a combination of reasons, task automation is rarely pursued as a personal or career goal in applications programming. Application programmers are, however, enthusiastic users when someone else provides them with automation tools for specific tasks. Since the kinds of tasks that get automated are usually tedious and time consuming, programmers would rather not do them by hand if they don’t have to.
