No machine can do my job until it learns how to drink.
yes and no.
Programming was and is a skill and an art but, like industrialization, we’ve distilled a lot of it down to rote techniques which can be automated and auto-coded by machine or quickly assembled by unskilled staff.
Like everything else that doesn’t completely eliminate the need for the actual, skilled, software engineer but those jobs will be harder to come by.
Seriously, most of what I write is designed to be automated or part of automation. But there seems to be a never ending stream of things to automate.
We can all be cops.
Yeah sure. And machine trading will be making money for people playing the stock market.
Might, maybe, could be, if, granted, theorized, prognosticated, possibly, perhaps, conceivably, perchance, credibly, feasibly, .......Not a chance...
To write the code for the machines that write the code.
My degree in Computer Science is from 1980 - 40 years ago. And 40 years before that, in 1940, there was pretty much no such thing as a computer. Hmmm.
ping
This is being said since the 1970s. The newest fad/hype is no code/low code.
Salary scales indicate they have been obsolete since about 2002.
Some programming will move to higher levels of abstraction. Humans will still provide the creativity and big picture designs, but automated systems will fill in the blanks. This will grow out of model based systems engineering. But there will always have to be low level systems coders. OS and driver builders. Or programmers in domains that are so specialized and or small-market that it isn’t cost effective to automate.
“Siri, build me an app ...”
If our department needs an application (that isn't available off the shelf) then we have to give them too much money to spend too much time developing an app that doesn't really do what we want. That's because they are all programmers who don't understand our business requirements. They may know how to handle abstract computer concepts such as stacks, queues, semaphores, etc. but they don't know our business processes and don't seem to care except what we put in the requirement spec. So basically it's our fault if we didn't get the requirement spec exactly right.
So that's where I come in. I write apps in low-level code such as VBA. I understand the requirements, I can develop and deliver code quickly, and it's in a format they are comfortable with, e.g. Excel spreadsheet.
I don't see how someone like me can be replaced by a program. The kinds of customizations that I need to add to the software in order to keep individual users, and the user group in general, happy are hard to predict and sometimes require driver-level adjustments in the code.
I lucked out that I didn't get forced into one of the programming departments, but it is a bit lonely being the only programmer around.
I gave this article careful consideration and then decided IT was bullshit.
Unit testing began in 1993, almost 30 years ago. Software development tools don't improve nearly as much or as fast as the author thinks. And while there can be improvements, the basic problem is in interpreting requirements. This is a human issue, and very often the person in charge of those requirements doesn't know exactly what they want. By the time you get explicit enough requirements for a code generator, you've pretty much got the code already.
If they ever develop an AI that can understand the always craptastic functional specs let me know because I will start a new religion and worship that phantasmagoric unicorn.
Trust me if, they ever build an AI that can do that it will essentially be Skynet and, after a couple of months working with the a55clowns that infest management, it will take out the world with nukes.
This is not that new.
I was working on code generators in the 80’s for C.
These things were out even earlier, for Cobol for Pete’s sake, in the 70’s.
You could lay out a relational database system, data entry and edit screens, reporting, etc. and it would churn out the code. Full code to implement an RDMS, in 2nd generation languages, no SQL.
Same nonsense was said in the 1980’s too. There isn’t that much automation and software has become far too fragile to automat it.
I think they should cut down a tree per day.