Best of the blogs: In response to articles about replacing programmers with more automation, Gordon Morrison’s new approach being the latest example, Bob Lewis reminds us in Concerned about automating programmer jobs? that such thinking “reappears every so often, sometimes succeeds, doesn’t eliminate programmer jobs, and goes away again,” he explains. “In an infinite universe, everything must happen somewhere at least once. If I had to play the odds, though, I wouldn’t bet that the magic compiler has happened here, on this planet, just yet.”Columnist’s corner: It’s advice to heed: Never send an HTML hacker to do a developer’s job. “Organizations are going ape over the promise of apps that deliver the desktop experience while running entirely on a server, zero client code, completely client-agnostic,” Tom Yager reports. Alas, it’s never so simple. “Unless the original application was idiot simple, turning it into a Web site is harder than many other types of porting projects,” Yager writes. Podcasts: Surveys, surveys and yet more surveys. This week’s SOA Report addresses the ever-elusive ROI, and the studies that support it. “If you wanna get in the press, go do a study,” David Linthicum says. And several folks have done just that. In reality, though, “a lot of people have not had time to figure out what kind of return on investment they can get from the implementation of a service-oriented architecture.” It’s too early to survey everybody on that. “The value of an SOA is going to be holistic, not about tactical deployments around applications.” Tune into SOA Report. Software Development