[hanbura]

>Part of me hopes software development is the next job we automate away

We are hard at work automating software development. Thanks to massive advances in programming language design, IDEs, the invention of module systems in combination with the massive success of OSS in that space and the proliferation of massive frameworks, something that took a year of work two decades ago is now at best a weekend project of a much less skilled person.

The thing that keeps us all employed is the incredibly elastic demand. And of course that the work to find and describe requirements is unlikely to be automated away anytime soon (and already often takes more time than actual implementation)

[HumanDrivenDev]

> Thanks to massive advances in programming language design

What massive advances in programming language design have we had since 1998!?

[0942v8653]

While a lot of the real advances in language design are not new, popular adoption of stuff like functional programming has happened in large part in the last twenty years. E.g. list comprehensions in Python were not introduced until Python 2.0 (2000, which just squeezes into your range). And Java is starting to get similar features, which is great for companies who have invested in the language.