According to the results of the IProgrammer Poll drag-and-drop designers have gone out of fashion - in fact they are considered to be "for sissies".

Over a thousand votes were cast in the January 2011 poll which asked for your opinion of user interface form designers and the overwhelming majority selected the choice "Designers are for sissies - code is the only way to go".

The choice to code from scratch rather than use a drag and drop diesigner led from the outset and while initially it was balanced by the number of votes in the two pro-form-designer categories by the end of the poll it was clear that requiring a drag-and-drop was the minority position and just a quarter of the votes took the middle way of it being "nice but not essential". 

Is this a reflection of a macho attitude to creating user interfaces or is code really better? It could be that the majority of UI design tools are fairly rubbish and cause so much difficulty that they aren't worth using. It could also be that programmers hate generated code and prefer to use what they have created even if it means spending hours adjusting the position of a button by making parameter changes.

What ever the reason it is clear that only a sissy uses a UI designer real programmers do it in code.

In the new poll that opens today the question is all in a name - or rather a job title. It asks what you prefer to be called and there are eight alternatives to choose from.

So make sure you cast your vote - and if your preferred title isn't in the list drop me an email -

editor@i-programmer.info