Re: It always makes me smile...
Mr Benny you are surely aware, are you not, that GUI software is created by software developers? Your narrow interpretation of (in your words) "software development in business enviroments" is what is at issue here. ALL software is developed in a business environment. Do you think that Microsoft develops its Office software in a field of sheep, or out at sea? An office full of programmers is a business environment.
Back-end processing, you say, is the 'vast majority'. That may be true, but who are you to say that little of that is done with software which has a GUI? Visual Studio programmers don't just write programs which display buttons and menus on the screen. They have to get the data from somewhere, and they write code to process the data.
VS makes software development easier because it has the tools to let programmers debug their software effectively, step through line by line in the code... if you are just an 'edit in vi, compile and run' programmer, that's fine, but that is old school and it is NOT the majority.
I've yet to work in a programming environment where there is back-end processing without the need to write code for front-end display of the data. If you have a custom back-end you need a custom front-end, hence the 'UI' in GUI - user interface.
Finally, It's telling that you add the caveat "unless its a web based system". Exactly. Welcome to the 21st century.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
