[bilch]

More like the last 50 or 60 years: "the programming occupation will become extinct (through the further development of self-programming techniques)" (Herbert A. Simon, 1961, and the notion seems to be even older, cf. Janet Abbate's "Re-Coding Gender", page 74-75)

From the same book (p. 84): "Stephanie Shirley, who started a contract programming company in the early 1960s, later recalled: 'When COBOL was introduced, we thought that would be the end of the company, that nobody would be buying software anymore – programming – because it was just so easy.'"