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by lemiffe 2210 days ago
I second those thoughts.

When I was 10 years old I started coding in Qbasic, a few years later I told my dad I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up, he told me that it would likely be automated soon (as had happened with his industry, electronic engineering) and I'd be struggling to find a job. 23 years later and the demand still seems to be rising.

I'd say we're still quite far from such level of abstraction; but a certain degree of it is already possible as you say... k8s/docker/kafka/glue/databricks/redshift, all of these technologies mesh together "seamlessly", but more problems arise as a result.

The problems we must tackle just shift elsewhere.
3 comments
xtracto 2209 days ago
And when UML started getting in vogue in the mid 90s a lot of people said that "intelligent code generators" would automate a large amount of programming.

It did not happen the way people predicted, but it has somehow happened in the form of Angular, Ionic, Express, Ruby-on-Rails and similar frameworks: More and more programming means "writing glue code", being it to glue Machine Learning libraries (yay, ML developer!), HTTP libraries (yay, Web developer!), AMQP/SQL/NoSQL (yay, backend developer!) or even OpenGL/DirectX/SDL (yay, game developer!).

The fact is, as more and more of these abstraction libraries are created, "programming" will go one level of abstraction up, but still need people to do it.

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lonelappde 2209 days ago
In 2002 the inventor of Microsoft Office (Charles Simonyi) took his $billions and left to create a company to replace programming with an Office-like app. In 2017 the company (Intentional) was acquihired back into MS after failing to generate a profit or popular product.
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Shorel 2208 days ago
Angular has allowed me to create REST UIs at only half the speed that I was used to 20 years ago when I was using FoxPro.

I call that progress.

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isolli 2210 days ago
I distinctly remember talking to programmers at a job fair in the mid-80s who warned me that there was not much future in programming.
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dave84 2210 days ago
What level of automation happened in electronic engineering?
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