Programmers today, he often says, are “unwitting cryptographers”: they gather requirements and knowledge from their clients and then, literally, hide that valuable information in a mountain […] of code. The catch is, once the code is written, the programmers have to make any additions or changes by modifying the code itself . That work is painful, slow, and prone to error. We shouldn’t be touching the code at all, Simonyi says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=18047