I like the arrogance present in the title. "Eternal promise" in a discipline that was conceived about a century ago.
The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
101–110 of 246 posts
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am starting to think it is a part of the management cycle. They new batch feels confident they can do X so they have to re-learn, while inflicting ridiculous amount of pain the process. Two years ago, one former exec at my place was perfectly happy to throw resources ( his word ) from India at a problem, while unwilling to pay the vendor for the same thing. I voiced my objection once, but after it was dismissed I j…
History truly repeats itself. C-suites will forever be the source of stupid decisions in our profession.
C-suites are the source of all the important decisions, both the great ones and the stupid ones. The great people in the C-suite have figured out how to get advice from people who are below them and not "yes-men" to tell them what to decide - but right or wrong the buck stops there.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
For quite a while i was thinking how we're in the phase one: mountains of unmaintainable garbage code being generated... and once the shit hits the fan, some maintainability ceiling gets reached - "the real programmers" will be summoned to clean up and deal with this shit. Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuff…
You still have to ship a product though. This task was famously incredibly difficult back when we had people producing unmaintainable mountains of millions of lines of code, to the point where shipping anything sizable in a working state on time without last minute scope reductions is nearly unheard of. I can't imagine using AI to add another one to two zeroes to the lines of code counter would help reach the goal po…
Testing to ensure the product works as expected is more than half of the product development labor if you want a quality product. This includes time spends on things like the mandatory "anti-harassment" training any competent HR is forcing you to once in a while even though not related to product delivery (or so I hope - some should be fired for the problems you are causing by not living that training)
LLMs can write a lot of code. they can even write a comprehensive test suite for that code. However they can't tell you if it doesn't work because of some interaction with something else you didn't think about. They can't tell you that all race conditions are really fixed (despite being somewhat good at tracking them down when known). They can't tell you that the program doesn't work because it doesn't do something critical that nobody thought to write into the requirements until you noticed it was missing.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#104I'd say that the article left out Software Reuse - talked a lot more about in the late 90's early 00's than now. You could argue that coding with LLM's is a form of software reuse, that removes some of its disadvantages.
If you have been in the industry for a few decades you will be able to think of several hundred "silver bullets" that made great promises - some even turned out to be great ideas, but none where the 10x revolution that they promised.
The article is a good summary of major movements through the decades without so much that whole point is lost in the details. I would have put in a slightly different set of things if I wanted to write that article, but the point would still stand and I would leave out many things that could be put in but would be too much noise.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#105This topic always reminds me of "The Last One",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) :
> "The name derived from the idea that The Last One was the last program that would ever need writing, as it could be used to generate all subsequent software."
That was released in 1981. Spoiler alert: it was not, in fact, the last one.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#106Until a year ago I believed as the author did. Then LLMs got to the point where they sit in meetings like I do, make notes like I do, have a memory like I do, and their context window is expanding. Only issue I saw after a month of building something complex from scratch with Opus 4.6 is poor adherence to high-level design principles and consistency. This can be solved with expert guardrails, I believe. It won’t be l…
I've been hearing this for several years. How much longer is "it won't be long"?
I've heard the same "it won't be long" from UML and 4GL - until the industry finally gave up. Both of those are still used a lot in industry and they do well in their place, but nobody pretends they will ever be everything to everyone anymore.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#107> There is every reason to believe that those who invest in deep understanding will continue to be valuable, regardless of what tools emerge. I don't take issue with this, except that it's a false comfort when when you consider the demand will naturally ebb and individual workload will naturally escalate. In that light, I find it downright dishonest because the rewards for attaining deep knowledge will continue to ev…
Most of these "class traitors" live in high cost of living areas, and for them, the choice is "become unemployed within two weeks for not complying", or "become unemployed within a few years for complying". They are being betrayed by the shareholder class, and they in turn are betraying their customers and their species.
The only thing that we can do is to not make it worth their time in the long run. Don't let greed and fear slide. Don't hate someone for choosing their family and comfort over your own, hate the system that forces them to make that choice. Hold them accountable, but attack the system, instead of its hostages and victims.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#108Something else that really should be mentioned:
Every recession where there was mass lay-offs on programmers (not every recession hits programmers hard), there were many articles saying that whatever that latest thing [see article] was the cause of this and industry is getting rid of programmers they will never need again.
In every case of course "it is the economy stupid". The tools made little difference in the need for programmers. The tools that worked actually increased the need because things you wouldn't even attempt without the tools were now worth hiring extra people to do.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#109I'd say that the article left out Software Reuse - talked a lot more about in the late 90's early 00's than now. You could argue that coding with LLM's is a form of software reuse, that removes some of its disadvantages.
It's talked about a lot now, too - that's ultimately what is meant by such terms as Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM).
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#110I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM employee that we would regret having majored in computer science because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged like milk. Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My…
I attended a CASE tools conference in the 1990s, which of course included a vendor exhibition. The vendors all had demos of creating an application using their tool. At multiple vendor stands I asked to see the code generated by their CASE tool. Invariably, the salespeople would start waffling about how the code was no longer important (sound familiar?), how you didn't need to examine the engine of a car while driving it, and so on. It had a very "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" feel to it. It convinced me that I didn't need to pay any attention to CASE tools, and history confirmed that.