Is BPEL the bytecode for the process space?

David Chappell suggests that it might be.

One sentence in his article stuck out. He wrote:

And just as almost nobody except tool vendors works directly in or even thinks much about Java bytecode, the day may come when almost nobody except tool vendors works directly in or thinks much about BPEL

I agree with that sentence, but the implication is odd. I don't know anybody even today who works directly in BPEL or thinks about it. On my client projects, when I am building executable processes, I will use a graphical tool (in my case WebSphere Integration Developer or WebSphere Business Modeler, depending on what I'm doing). With one or two exceptions, I can't think of a time where I've even needed to look at the generated BPEL.