[BrokerChange]

Farming became obsolete because of economies of scale.

Factory work became obsolete because of economies of scale.

Manufacturing became obsolete because of economies of scale.

What do you think is our generation's economy of scale?

I think the near future will involve making it possible for anyone, even those without a technical background, to quickly build beautiful internet products.

What do you think is the next big leap? What would make coding obsolete?

[jbester]

Obsolete is a strong word. What happens in these industries is that they get split into the high-end (organic farming, small order manufacturing) and the mass-production low-end. Yes in many ways margin have fallen but overall production has gone up, way up.

That being said - retail seems to be our generation's victim. In the last decade, we've replaced media consumables with digital equivalents. This alone has mostly killed music, book, and movie rental stores. It's not just retail stores but retail services - tax prep, insurance, and financial services. Some of this took place in the 90's, but it continued in the 00's and it will continue in the 10's.

[BrokerChange]

I do agree that is a strong word. I guess what I was referring to was it's obselenece as a mass profession. I assumed that was implicit, wrongfully.

I was hoping to drive home the point that while coding is the "it" thing right now, eventually someone will build a framework that makes having a technical background moot (similar to the power YouTube has given to the home movie producer or music artist).

I think you may be right in regards to the retail prediction. Amazon is going to continue to absorb the majority of retail sales, especially as baby boomers (the highest spending demographic in history) completes the retirement cycle and diminishes disposable income in the market.

[damian2000]

The big thing when I was studying 20 years ago was "CASE" tools - computer aided software engineering tools, 4GLs (fourth generation languages) and later UML - these were going to make developers job nothing more than designing pretty diagrams in a tool which spit out the nicely polished code at the end. Nothing has come of any of these technologies. If anything the coding landscape has become more fragmented and difficult than ever before - just look at the plethora of Web Development Languages, JavaScript, ObjectiveC and the fact that C/C++ is still the most popular language out there.

[gnaritas]

None of those things became obsolete, they just moved to cheaper labor pools.

> What would make coding obsolete?

Nothing except full blown AI.