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OK, take Excel. It provided a way for a lot of non-programmers, who didn't want to become programmers, to program enough to get their work done. And that's great! But if you look at a graph of the number of people employed as programmers, and you look for the point where that number started to decline because Excel made them unnecessary, well, you don't find it. Excel made simpler stuff available for simpler problems, but it didn't address bigger problems, and there were plenty of bigger problems to go around. And when we talk about fundamentally improving programming, we aren't talking about improving it for those trying to solve Excel-level problems. (That's still worth doing! It's just not what we're talking about.) So if you can create a new Excel for some area, it will take off. And that's great, for the people who can use it. It won't be all of programming, but it will be a paradigm shift for those who use it. Will that be a paradigm shift for all of programming? Depends on how many people use it. My bet would be that there is no Excel-like shift (or no-code shift) in, say, the next 20 years, that will affect even 30% of what we currently recognize as programmers. (If you introduce a great no-code thing, and 10% of current programmers shift to use it, and a ton of newcomers join them, that still only counts as 10% by my metric, in the same way that we don't really count Excel jockeys as professional programmers.) |