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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

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Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#121

Post by voxl »

wincy wrote: post #120
simonw wrote: post #58

I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart Which includes this excellent line: > Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available p…

In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher at community college night school was at a party and a man who he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now too! This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!” The word programmer had a ve…

What makes you think that trend won't continue? In the Myspace era people constantly said "oh I know some html", now we will have people saying "oh I can make LLMs generate python"

Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling. Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs taking software jobs, but it is possible they will require the level of skill to be employable to spike.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#122

Post by SoftTalker »

hearsathought wrote: post #116
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #62

One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programm…

> non-programmers began programming without knowing they were Using excel in the traditional sense isn't the same as programming. Unless they were doing some VBA or something like that which the vast majority of excel/spreadsheet users don't. > spreadsheet formulae formulas. We aren't speaking latin here. > I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and…

Excel was the biggest example of a "4GL" that actually succeeded. They mentioned Access but Excel was by far more widely used. Excel enabled analysts to do so much on their own that they used to have to ask programmers in their IT department to do. Other spreadsheets too, at first, but Excel ended up dominating.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#123

Post by tbrownaw »

tkel wrote: post #39
cjfd wrote: post #2

The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.

Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect. Democracy is about governance, not access. A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.

The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have.

(Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#124

Post by guitarbill »

simonw wrote: post #86
guitarbill wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One counter-example is the Horizon IT scandal. Obviously, you didn't say this directly, but "only a few people died/were affected, somehow civilization continues to function" maybe isn't the best argument.

Sure, that scandal was horrific. I don't think the root cause was amateurs with bad spreadsheets. It was an institutional failure, and the software involved had hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it and was built by supposed professionals.

Sure, we can ignore that specific example, and that software has an effect on the world, and that people have been trained to expect software to be deterministic and accurate.

Or if you want compare vibe coding with any technology, like electricity. Sure, that one person got electrocuted or their house burned down. But it's just so useful, and "somehow civilization continues to function". I guess they should've known better.

I'm personally not comfortable hyping up the benefits whilst ignoring the risks, especially for lay people.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#125

Post by SteveNuts »

simonw wrote: post #64
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #62

One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programm…

I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

> Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy.

The difference is those spreadsheets were buried on a company internal fileshare and the blast radius would be contained to that organization.

Today vibe coders can type a prompt, click a button, and their thing is exposed directly to the internet and ready to suck up any data someone uploads.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#126

Post by georgemcbay »

benj111 wrote: post #118
ekidd wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence . The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavo…

Talking heads reference? Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system. We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement. I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum,…

> Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable

Also worth noting that even in Star Trek, which is viewed as a utopian vision of the future, the sort of societal changes you are talking about only came after humanity almost wiped itself out in a third world war (which coincidentally happened to start in 2026)

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#128

Post by krisoft »

guitarbill wrote: post #124
simonw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that scandal was horrific. I don't think the root cause was amateurs with bad spreadsheets. It was an institutional failure, and the software involved had hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it and was built by supposed professionals.

Sure, we can ignore that specific example, and that software has an effect on the world, and that people have been trained to expect software to be deterministic and accurate. Or if you want compare vibe coding with any technology, like electricity. Sure, that one person got electrocuted or their house burned down. But it's just so useful, and "somehow civilization continues to function". I guess they should've known…

> we can ignore that specific example

We are not ignoring it. It is just not an example of a load bearing excel sheet.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#129

Post by chihuahua »

simonw wrote: post #58

I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart Which includes this excellent line: > Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available p…

I guess the idea that a programmer can create software that then runs on multiple computers would have blown their mind.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#130

Post by nurettin »

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #62

One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programm…

> began programming without knowing they were

Worse, they were doing functional programming just by chaining formulas without side effects, surpassing the skills of most self-proclaimed programmers out there.

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