Simon St. Laurent – Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access:

"The general practice set by Access's creators from the beginning was to do as much as possible through visual interfaces rather than through code. In that, perhaps more than anything else, they struck a balance that made Access approachable while still letting it be powerful.

Rails culture runs the other direction. GUIs are the end product, but the code is pretty much all plain text. There are some tools for creating Rails forms out there, but an amazing number of developers work through text editors.

[…] Those barriers leave me stuck dreaming. I'm now as comfortable working in Rails as I ever was in Access, but there aren't a lot of direct paths from here to there. I'd love to see someone write an interface for Rails interface development that feels like Access, but there's no question it would be a difficult challenge."