[Aeolos]

People said that during the switch from assembly to C, and then again from C to managed languages. Yet, at each point, there are more and better software engineers, solving more and more challenging problems at each step - the modern web would not exist if all we had at our disposable was 80's era assembly.

Aren't you at least a bit curious what new possibilities this technology could enable? What new discoveries could e.g. an expert doctor or a biologist achieve given access to programming tools without spending decades learning programming?

[rob74]

I disagree that the problems are more and more challenging - "modern web" applications mostly only do what desktop applications did in the 80s/90s, just with some added complexity due to client/server and trying to use a technology that grew "organically" and wasn't designed for building such applications (HTML/CSS/JS).

Also, while the programming languages you mentioned did evolve to higher levels of abstraction, one thing that didn't change was that you still were telling the computer what it should do. Of course, you could still run into problems when the abstractions you were relying on didn't do quite what you were expecting, but now you have Copilot giving you globs of code that supposedly do what you want to do. How are you supposed to check if it really does that if you haven't got the slightest idea about programming?

[Aeolos]

I don't think there's any objective measure by which software has not become more complex over time.

The uefi bootloader contains more code and complexity than your average 90s OS. Your smartphone is running at least two, possibly more operating systems. Desktop software of the past decades did not have to deal with even a fraction of the security considerations of even a simple web app. The base runtime of your typical managed language alone is more complex than complex desktop apps of the past.

> How are you supposed to check if it really does that if you haven't got the slightest idea about programming?

This one is easy: you check if its output matches your expectation. In the same way you don't need to know how to program a calculator in order to use one.

If you want to get fancy, you could even ask it to encode your expectations as a test suite.

You may be surprised to hear that a large amount, maybe even the majority, of academic research does not use source control, unit testing, etc, yet they still manage to get work done.

I've even encountered this in industrial research from teams in large companies that you'd expect to know better...