"I quietly wait for the day when stupid managers are replaced by smarter managers who realize that Excel, Access, and its ilk only create drones that copy and paste all day, tend to their macros that greatly complicate "simple" programming problems(therefore, must be tended to), and create "irreplaceable employees" that you can't fire because what they do is so poorly documented the business would stop running for an unexceptable time if you did (hmm, what does this cell do . . .).

I can't wait . . .until outsourcing to India and China makes programming so cheap that all those drones who think they are "knowledge workers" can finally be set free to get real careers because companies can now afford masters of Perl and the DBI module to actually bring back efficiency and dignity to the human race by expressing human thought in a burst of insightful code ONCE, instead of mindless clicks and grunts every month, an endless cycle of futility.

Mind you, these new knowledge workers will most likely be home grown, once unemployed programmers who went back to school to learn accounting and finance. They will believe in solving the same problem ONCE and will not be afraid to code to get the job done. They will also have seen how accountants have bettered their own profession by making it independent of corporate interests and hopefully will bring the same to the IT profession (which I will work hard to become a member of).

Until then, it is back to writing Perl to deal with the stupidity that apps like Excel and Access breed . . .

Seek the truth, and ye will find Open Source."

• Linux Across the Seven Seas: Report on "IT's Esperanto"