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OK, I'm not a programmer, so some of this conversation is frankly beyond my competence, but it seems to me that a key religious difference was brought up by Jimmie:
"Zope is probably somewhat more complex behind the scenes because it attempts to make the job easier for the 'user' of the Zope web development tool, not necessarily the 'developer'. Zope is great for managing content and users."
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Yes I have stated and maintain that there are philosophical differences.
However, you just provided the reason beyond separation of 'user' and 'developer' with the "I am not a programmer..." statement.
There are many people using Zope to build websites who are not programmers. They don't know OO from procedural from functional from multi-paradigm, ... Nor should they need to. They don't know Python from Perl from Tcl. They don't know SQL. They just want to build a website.
Within website development firms you have seperation between people who do the programming and people who do the design. There are real seperations in real places. However, they are those who do it all.
This is actually not an uncommon model.
Real life, real things, do not generally require the user to know how it works. When you operate a real machine, you know how to interact with the machine. You have a basic 'contract' with the machine in that when you do a particular action it performs a particular function. It should be consistent and repeatable. There are users of the machine and there are developers/maintainers of the machine.
As far as open source goes, I am very pro open source. I use many open source products and never have the desire to look at the code. I feel better knowing it is available with appropriate licensing.
I am at work writing this message from a proprietary platform that has bugs I would love to see fixed. If I was an expert in this area I could do nothing due to the lack of source and licensing.
I advocate open source to friends who have absolutely no desire or intention in programming. It is still of tremendous benefit. Open source does not just benefit programmers it benefits everyone.
