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The future is fewer people writing code?

techcrunch.com

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Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#21

Post by gonehome »

pmlnr wrote: post #6

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be." Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old. Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something…

I agree, though I think there are improvements that could make things better even for existing languages. It just doesn't seem to be a main focus of our industry.

I found a lot of ideas in this article to be pretty interesting: http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#22

Post by pmlnr »

xxs wrote: post #9
pmlnr wrote: post #6

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be." Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old. Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something…

you missed assembler; it's still a thing

I did miss that, true; however, Assembly is heavily architecture-tied. Therefore x86 Assembly significantly differs from, for example, ARM assembly, but nonetheless I should have mentioned it.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#23

Post by PaulHoule »

Progress happens slow in the short term and fast in the long term.

In the 1980s, there was a consensus that "software components" enabled by object orientation were a pipe dream.

They were so long as you were using C++ which was barely binary compatible and where you couldn't reuse objects in a .so file without also having an .h file. It was awful, not at all a minimal viable product.

Then Java came along and a number of other languages that adopted essentially the same model for OO programming such as Python, PHP, Ruby, C#, etc.

Now you can cut and paste a few lines of XML into Maven and woohoo... You've incorporated a software component into your system.

People bitch that it has to be XML, but the sheer ease of doing so means it is not hard at all to get 100+ dependencies in a project and now the problem is dealing with the problems that come when you have 100+ dependencies.

(And of course the same is true with npm and every other language that has similar tools.)

Two big themes are: (i) tools that reduce the essential difficulty of software development and (ii) antiprofessionalism in software engineering.

Compilers like FORTRAN mean you don't need to have the intimacy with the machine you need to write, say, Macro Assembler. That is mainstream, but other technologies, such as logic programming and rules engine are still stillborn. In theory tools like that mean the order of execution does not matter so much so you don't need the skill to figure out what order to put the instructions in. Practically they are yet to become vernacular tools that are palatable to programmers and non-programmers. (Anything programmers can't stand will be 10x more painful to non-programmers, I can tell you that!)

Anti-professionalism is another big theme. Had computers come around 20 years earlier we would probably have a programmer's union, licensing and other things that would make a big difference in our lives. As it is, the beef that programmers have is not that we don't get paid enough, it is that we are often forced into malpractice by management.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#24

Post by spotman »

Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but I agree with the article overall.

My view is less that programming is going away, and more that all jobs are. Not immediately or anything, but I don't think we are going to magically produce programming jobs for all the masses who are going to need a job.

Having been at this over 15 years I have single handedly automated thousands of jobs, and of those a healthy handful are making things more efficient that a project needs less programmers, etc..

So while we will still need programmers probably forever , I'm not sure why people think that the number of programming jobs will do anything but stay the same or decrease, while the number of candidates increases.

Tooling has come so far, and it's going to go farther. You don't need to know a lot to make something meaningful anymore.

How we expect to train all children to be programmers and think that by the time they are our age it will still be a field that is lucrative is silly I think. My prediction is with all the new programmers coming into the field intersecting with the tooling getting better, intersecting with that a lot of other markets need less people I think we are left with a crowded field of players where the average skill level is lower because the tasks do not require it to be all that high any more.

Programming is the new carpentry. Probably jobs for a long time , but training the children now like it's going to be the most amazing career path is short sighted I think.

Considering this, I hope my kids don't pick programming as a career. I would love to be wrong.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#26

Post by malux85 »

dkopi wrote: post #15

"The future I imagine is a world in which programming is self-explanatory, where people talk to computers to build software. To get there, programming tools should first use our language." But is: "For every button on the page that is a "warning" button, replace the background color to red." Necessarily better than? $("button.warning").css("background-color", "red")

Yes - it's miles better. If you're unconciously competant (i.e. good at your job) they might seem like they both take about the same cognitive effort to understand.

But think for a beginner:

What is $ ? Is it money?

What are () for?

What is CSS?

I want to shade it, so lets do background-shade .. oh, color only works, so you have to know all the terms.

Can I do "background-color" "red blue white striped"

What is button.warning? Can I do button.border ?

These are all questions a newbie could ask - because they have no experience in the "domain language"

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#27

Post by greenimpala »

pmlnr wrote: post #6

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be." Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old. Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something…

Agree completely!

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#30

Post by mattnewton »

madelinecameron wrote: post #7
mattnewton wrote: post #2

I don't know if I agree with the author since they didn't seem to provide any evidence / argument for why the future is codeless. They did warn me though that I wouldn't be able to understand from my vantage point in Silicon Valley though so maybe other people see the argument? But from my perspective code is only growing without showing signs of abating.

First off, I agree. I agree that everyone who continually says "programming" is dying and in 5 - 10 years, "AI" will be writing code (or whatever else they can dream up) have no idea what they are taking about. Programming is definitely going to get easier and I don't doubt that it will become a common skill. I just doubt this idea that professional programming is a dying art or something. It is just silly to say tha…

I think we are on the same page, but I was genuinely hoping someone could fill in the gaps the author seemed to be hand waving about. Is programming going to become an easier skill? Absolutely. What does that have to do with the means? What evidence do we have that drag and drop interfaces will replace the majority of coding? Why not something like swift playgrounds or some other IDE innovation that make the coding easier but get out of the way to expose the text if need be? Why is that harmful? Why is that not coding anymore?
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