Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's actually a great underlying point here, to make up for this comment's lackluster delivery thereof. If anything, Visual Basic is a great example of something that ended (a significant part of) programming. I don't know too many people these days writing WIN32 C GUIs any more, thanks to my above-described forces of abstraction. Sure, VB wasn't the best abstraction for graphical user interfaces -- it looks like…
That didn't end because of VB. The web has taken over desktop GUI programs because of how lucrative your personal information has become.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code
61–66 of 66 posts
Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code
#62Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.
I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…
The main problem with replacing programming is that programming is constantly evolving. Weebly can do most if not all of web 1.0 and some of web 2.0, but there is still a lot that it can't do. The rapid pace of technology doesn't slow down enough for our automated tooling to catch up. Unless we are talking about basically a sentient AI then I just don't see this really happening unless we are talking about replacing programmers that are barely programmers at all.
Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code
#63i started coding in the early 1980's and began coding professionally just after graduating from MIT in 1992. The "guidance counselor" at my high school recommended that i major in something other than computer science because he has read several thoughtful pieces that suggested the job of professional programmer would become "extinct" not because programming wasn't important but because it was too important (to leave to programmers)--sort of like the way many companies 50 years ago had large "typing pools"; these are gone because everyone can type.
looking across the span of my career so far, it seems these predictions are correct, in a horizon sense--ie, we've reached this distance line we pointed to 20 years ago, but there's no horizon there, it's still far in the distance.
here's what i mean: in 1992, my first job involved writing small extensions to numerical libraries, in C and FORTRAN. Probably 90 percent (if anything it was higher) of my time was spent "managing memory"--allocating it, deallocating it, pointing to it, etc.
now, the time i spend on those sorts of tasks is de minimis. So the march of technology never took away my job (the only job i have ever wanted to do) but it did take away 90% of it.
With 90% of my former tasks now handled elsewhere, far more interesting and challenging tasks have taken their place.
this is the trend i see--not the one-sided (or perhaps short-sited) trend described in the Wired post--but a continuous iteration of the programmer's work characterized by swapping well-characterized, routinized tasks for more challenging ones, most of which are would take some thought to foresee.
Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code
#64Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs. There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing…
Sigh. Apologists? Really? Look, people have been declaring the end to programming since it became a profession. Heck, man, Visual Basic was supposed to put us all out of work. Good grief, dude.
You believe that not a single datacenter has shuttered its doors since the success of AWS?
You think that every single person who was developing game engines for every one off indie game is still doing so after the success of various game engines?
Youre being obviously defensive here. Programming as a concept is obviously not going away, but many segments of the industry have already been taken out by automation.
>the end to programming since it became a profession
Would be as laughably ignorant as declaring the end of manual labor.
It will always continue to be done, but its need appears far lesser over time, requiring fewer people fewer hours to do the same tasks.
Automation isnt a sign on a door one day that says "shops closed, programmers dont exist anymore"
Automation is you slowly taking on more responsibility because technology makes that possible. Automation is the marketing team creating the company's website, because tools like squarespace have made it easy enough for them to do. Thats 1 web development job automated away, there's no pronouncement that we no longer need web developers worldwide, just that for an increasing number of cases, it is unnecessary to hire a specialist.
Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code
#65Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs. There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing…
Did the need for programmers dry up when off the shelf operating systems became mainstream, or when most of us started writing in higher level languages instead of assembly? Software just gets more complex and expands in scope when we can build on top of new abstractions. Each time this has happened we've ended up with more programming jobs not fewer.
Why is it so unreasonable to think that some of these very real "trivialities" can't be automated in some way?
Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did the need for programmers dry up when off the shelf operating systems became mainstream, or when most of us started writing in higher level languages instead of assembly? Software just gets more complex and expands in scope when we can build on top of new abstractions. Each time this has happened we've ended up with more programming jobs not fewer.
Ever heard a coder jokingly call themselves a "professional Googler" or "StackOverflow copy&paster"? Why is it so unreasonable to think that some of these very real "trivialities" can't be automated in some way?
It's just that--a joke. Any employed programmer who copy and pastes any significant amount of code from stack overflow is doing more harm than good.
And googling a problem, looking at examples and modifying them to solve your particular problem is certainly not trivial. When AI can do that for arbitrarily complex problems, we have a lot more to worry about than out of work programmers.