The Extinction of the Programming Species 491
Max Goff writes "Given the recent chatter surrounding the extinction of the U.S. programmer, /. readers might also be interested in a series of articles I recently penned for java.net -- the Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper (part 1, part 2 and part 3) -- in which I posit that the postmodern programmer (the entire sub-species, not just those domiciled in the U.S.) shares much with the
blacksmith of old, and will become just as extinct in relatively short order. It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."
The real reason (Score:5, Funny)
The real reason-Test Tube Baby. (Score:3, Funny)
Why do you think test tubes were invented?
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Funny)
And yet most of us try to reproduce asexualy on a daily bassis. In fact, most of the internet is geared to helping us.
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Funny)
Egad! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Egad! (Score:5, Funny)
My "academia" meter was flying high (Score:5, Insightful)
The pomo coder stripe has evolved into something quite different than what it once may have been.
You probably thought that word was "porno" -- but no, it's short for post-modern, and it's thrown around all the time for no good reason in academia. I stopped reading the article after seeing that, and a smattering of insofars and posits when I flipped ahead to part 2. Oh yeah, and I ran into this:
But as we will see, the impact on the exogenous environment of remittable activities of autonomous agents can be profound indeed.
Indeed, indeed. That's a great sign that you are reading a paper that will take thousands and thousands of words to argue something that could have been said in three crisp, short paragraphs. Nothing against the writer -- he's got a great vocabulary, and he's using the words correctly... but you see this all the time in academic writing, because "it just doesn't sound right" without a few latin phrases and a "dialectic" or two, because everyone around you is writing like this, too. Sadly, it only complicates or even loses the real argument, and most of your readers who have never been force-fed this kind of fare and made to like it will also be lost. So, to the author: Fight the impulse!! Turn away from the dark side! Therein lies a twisty maze of passages, all alike....
Re:My "academia" meter was flying high (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd give you mod points if I could.
I've been force fed this kind of academic drivel for decades and nothing will make me ever like it. I was even one of the editors of an academic, peer-reviewed technical journal years ago, but my attempts to turn the academic gibberish into clear English were ultimately fruitless. Both authors and senior editors seemed to feel that clear writing posed a threat to t
I, Roboto (Score:3, Interesting)
When we have robotic programmers, then I'll buy your argument.
great news! (Score:3, Interesting)
So my work experience and part of my academic background was all for nothing this says? Great news! Now that I've studied for more than 4 years, I learn it is going to be useless.
I'm wondering how many other slashdotters feel like me at the moment. Extinction of the programmer species means for me that I lost a few years of my life and now I have to change my carreer. What about the other thousands like me?
Re:great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I see it, if the current demand for software systems doesn't change, this argument may possibly hold *SOME* water. However, users keep pushing what they want onto the cutting edge of what current systems can do.
For an analagous example, look at processing power. When companies come out with faster processors, do we just run the same applications, but now just faster? No. Not only do our standard applications do new and *cough cough* wonderful things, We find new and exciting uses for our extra processing power. which in turn pushes the need for even faster processors.
It seems that the extra time made available by the eases of case tools, intelligent IDEs and more intuitive syntax is being put to use implementing more sophisticated architectures, developing more robust business logic and implementing more useable software overall.
Without the increase in productivity associated with evolving programming tools (ie languages,environments,frameworks) would we have more programmers working on projects of the same scale as today, or the same number of programmers working on projects with less usability?
Re:great news! (Score:5, Interesting)
The premise of the article is also similar to the kinds of arguments people were making in the '80s about expert systems:
"We can develop inference systems for all these professions with voluminous, but highly specialized knowlege bases, and then we won't need the highly trained professionals anymore".
This also harkens to a software engineering fantasy that we can standardize and simplify hard problems. There are many who disagree with this point of view, including Fred Brooks [berkeley.edu].
An interesting take on the failures of software is Jaron Lanier's One Half of a Manifesto [edge.org]. (Actually even more enlightening is the debate that ensued around the manifesto (responses [edge.org], reply [edge.org]).
Re:great news! (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.
Re:great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
But the current great extinction has nothing to do with any of the things he's talking about. It has to do with the outsourcing, the bust of the dot com bubble, and a popular belief that now that the dot com bubble has burst, you don't have worry about that computer stuff anymore (I kid you not--a lot of technophobes out there actually think it is all going to go away.)
There is no question that programming will evolve, and that we will work at higher and higher levels in the future. But it is equally true that as the methods ramp up, so will the target, and competition to produce software that reaches that target quickly, efficiently, and easily will demand the best solution, which is always hand tweaked. Build by number tools are always general--2,000,000 lines of code used to do what 1000 lines would do better, because the code is literally written with no idea of what the real task is. And to use these high level tools effectively there are always "Tips, Tricks, and Traps," which require a background knowledge of the underlying architecture to grasp.
And by the way, assembler still does everything better than anything else. Check out Gibson Research (http://www.grc.com/ [grc.com]) for proof of that.
As for genetic programming, allow me to contrast the hand coded solution to the genetically designed solution:
Hand coded: 2 + 2 = 4;
Genetic: 1 + 1 + 3 - (4 * 3) + 3 + (6/2) + 2.5 + 1.5 + ln(e) = 4
Yeah, it will give you the right result... eventually. But if you want to read your email, you better book a couple days time with WETA's server farm. Not to mention that it takes as long to train one of these as it does a human--and it takes someone who knows a lot about computers (a very good programmer) to specify the criteria. A good example: the Pentagon wanted a genetic algorithm that could recognize a tank. They got one that seemed to work, until a new set of photos were used. It turned out that all the criteria photos with tanks were taken on a sunny day, and all the others were taken on a cloudy day. So if the sun is out, it's a tank. Doh!
The more sophisticated the software is, the harder it is to fix when something goes wrong. Superficially simple applications for complex tasks are that much harder to diagnose and fix when they fail. Windows appears easy, until a bug rears its head, and then it takes thousands of man hours just to track down the cause. Linux has a steeper learning curve, but a core simplicity once you're over the hump. Simple software is simple because the brain is built in. But that doesn't mean that the brain will always work.
Eventually, someone will have to go down and sing to the metal.
Reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
Extinction of the programmer species means for me that I lost a few years of my life and now I have to change my carreer.
If it happened, but it hasn't.
To succeed as a programmer, develop better powers of discernment (by observing others you respect) and learn how to maintain confidence in your decisions.
Re:great news! (Score:2)
Seriously, go look into any department of any medium to large company and see if their degrees match what they are doing. You got finance people doing engineering, engineers doing finance, people with degrees in history doing finance, all sorts of stuff.
Personally I think it's stupid and you should get pai
Re:great news! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
College isn't a trade school, and you shouldn't treat it that way. The most important thing you learn in college is how to learn. In many, if not most, fields what you learn in college is outdated by the time you finish (if it wasn't when you started) but it does (or should) give you a strong background from which to learn other things. In graduate school you learn how to learn things that nobody knows yet.
As an example, an undergraduate physics degree from a pretty decent school will get you to about the mid-1950s as far as physics knowledge, with a few little tastes of stuff from the 70s(and maybe even the present, if you work in someone's lab). You can fake your way into a lot of engineering jobs from there, and if you go to graduate school, you catch up to maybe the 70s (or even 80s and 90s) in a lot of areas, and you take one small piece of physics right up to the present day and become a world expert on it, adding new knowledge at the leading edge. All the stuff you learn along the way provides important context and background knowledge, but the most important thing you learn is how to obtain new knowledge. If you need any of that stuff that you didn't have time to learn (because the field has gotten very large) you at least get the tools to go back and catch up quickly. Computer Engineering has to be much the same, if not more so, since things are changing even faster than in physics.
Re:great news! (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right , of course, but, its no consolation to a recent graduate with 30,000 in debts and no job prospects.
Re:great news! (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing that most bothers me when I check out job web sites is that the only work that seems to stay in the US anymore is defense stuff that can't be offshored because of the need for cleare
Re:great news! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well then, I would like to pay this particular corner of the world for my student loans accordingly.
The problem with this "no one owes you anything" attitude is that if you're paying for something, whether in work or dollars, it very distinctly owes you something in return.
See, I can bee a FReeper too.
Blacksmith? (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's the direction TFA is taking...I highly doubt it. To quote the Borg Queen from ST: First Contact: "You are an imperfect being created by an imperfect being."
Unless humans as a whole somehow reach perfection, we'll never be able to produce something to completely replace the human element.
Re:Blacksmith? (Score:2, Insightful)
A factory machine is not autonomous, it doesnt just do everything itself, it must still be told what to do.
I see development work adapting and expanding, and yes I see fewer actually code monkey jobs.
In a computerised brassband, there is still a need for a skilled composer.
Re:Blacksmith? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this is a bad thing; I don't agree with the chicken little tone of this story. If we have a lot of blacksmiths--e.g. high skilled, labor-intensive jobs--dominating any given sector, they should be disappearing at a healthy clip. The US (or any country, for that matter) is left better off as a result. That's just plain and simple Econ. 101: technological advancement drives long term growth and prosperity. Programmers (esp. on Slashdot) are quick to lament the de-commoditization of their profession, because it means lower wages and more competition than that to which they became accustomed in the nineties. But there's no denying that in an overall, macro sense, having a nation full of Java programmers will result in much greater overall well-being than one of 10,000 C haxors and 250 million farmers.
Re:Blacksmith? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blacksmith? (Score:2)
I can make entire vacation plans online via a computer, and have it processed by a computer. Yet, I don't see any stories about "Travel agents becoming extinct!"
Although, maybe I need to visit traveldot.org instead for those stories...
Re:Blacksmith? (Score:2)
They only really work for the odd or complicated jobs, these days, I think.
(Think - school going on a trip, not family going on a trip.)
Re:Blacksmith? (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but humans will survive by learning to service the machines.
"Do you want WD-40 with that sir?"
Re:Blacksmith? (Score:2)
Depends what you mean by human element. Kurzweil is making the case that we are producing the next step in the evolutionary process by creating machines (computers) that are increasingly complex and fast. If you look at the whole of evolution progress has been exonential, with each successive milestone being reached more and more quickly.
When computers become as complicated as the human brain they will be able to "evolve"
The value of reading the article (Score:2)
His primary rationale is this:
The blacksmith isn't gone-- it's called machinist (Score:3, Insightful)
Production machinists (who were in many cases still quite a skilled population) are being replaced by CNC machines, and the "machinists" now are the people who turn art into things that the machines can cut, set up the machines, diagnose their problems, etc. Eventually they may be replaced entirely by mechanical/manufac
Why? Heres why! (Score:2)
It's all a fad (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the same with diet/exercise. As the years go on new diets/plans come and go yet the old school traditional "just eat less crap, more good and get off your ass" philosophy is still here.
Wanna make sure you're employable as a software developer? Make sure you're actually knowledgeable about the science *and* the field. It's good to know about things like Java/C++/etc but it's equally important to know about design theory, algorithms, math, etc.
So if you signed up for some 6 month "computer science" program well don't blame the industry for your unemployable status. Code monkeys are a dime-a-dozen.
Tom
Re:It's all a fad (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, at least until the next round of layoffs.
Wanna make sure you're employable as a software developer? Make sure you're actually knowledgeable about the science *and* the field.
You know, the animation industry is a good example of why this doesn't work. Disney laid off hundreds upon hundreds of totally irreplaceable feature animators over the past few years, most recently in Florida. These people were almost directly responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to the company. But, they're too expensive.
So to fuck all with their skill, experience and DIRECT INFLUENCE ON TOP-LINE REVENUE, out on their ass they went with their pencils and ink and an EIGHT-DECADE tradition of animation quality right after them.
Companies don't give a fuck about skill or education. It's too expensive. They would much rather sell shit at a 50,000% markup and congratulate themselves at company parties.
Re:It's all a fad (Score:5, Insightful)
And if not, hey, they could draw kickass invitations for those company parties. With bunnies and gold stars and shit. It's a win win, dude.
-fren
Re:It's all a fad (Score:2)
I would imagine many of these people retrained as computer animators, which Disney, Pixar et al still need.
Yep, a lot of them did. Animators are more than just artists, they understand how to make movement look right, and how to express emotions drama and humour through it.
Re:It's all a fad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all a fad (Score:4, Informative)
Absolute nonsense. Lilo and Stitch was their most recent film. It was so "unprofitable" (over $260 million at the box office) that Disney has published several DVDs and a made television show from it. Disney kept the animators employed for a whole year before firing the entire studio. Oh, and they were so concerned about wasting money that they flushed the project they were working on (and all the money that had been spent) down a toilet.
Audiences today just don't like to watch untextured, cell-based cartoons anymore.
Really? There are 400 animation studios in Japan. Spirited Away won the Academy Award for best animated feature. The anime industry earns $4.3 billion a year in revenues. Pokemon's total market exceeds $30 billion.
The last hugely successful
Disney
cell-based film was Lion King
Home On the Range, was not a bad movie, but it made no money, because today's viewers want something else.
Yeah, like a writer. There are eight shelves of anime at Best Buy. There is an entire cable network that runs anime 24 hours a day. Some of the highest-rated shows on television are anime. Today's viewers want quality. Disney just doesn't want to pay for it.
Re:It's all a fad (Score:2)
As the tools improve (ie become more automated) you have to keep up with them, or become as anachronistic as the blacksmith mentioned.
One day, I think business ap
Re:It's all a fad (Score:5, Insightful)
- Metallurgical Tech./Technician
- Machinist
- Machine shop workers
- Steel workers
- locksmiths
- and many more...
Just becuase they don't call themselves Black Smiths, doesn't mean that can't trace back to some guy standing over an avil, pounding away with a hammer.Fad is Why We Always Need Programmers (Score:2, Insightful)
The automobile is a mature technology. If everyone would settle for one styling of car, then we could drive the price of the car so low that the profit margin is barely 1 penny. There would be no need to change the metal stampers. There would be no need to modify anything in the car. All 200 million adults in the USA would drive the exact same 4-door sedan. The economies of s
Ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. It has to do with the wholesale re-negotiation of the social contract between business and the society it sells to.
Business is no longer satisfied with the simple model of building a product and selling it. That would require work, investment, long-term planning and respect for the skill, education and loyalty of their employees.
Much better, business says, to sell all of that and simply manufacture brands. The modern workplace is therefore obsolete, because business does not want to pay for it. It's really that simple. People are only useful if they are opening their wallets at a cash register. They are not worthy to be employed and paid a fair wage.
There are voluminous statistics to support this, but a few should be sufficient. In the last few years, corporate assets have increased 288%. Employee compensation has increased 9%.
Over half of the working-age population is either a temp, part-time, unemployed or out of the workforce entirely. Read it again: HALF OF THE WORKING-AGE POPULATION IS NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME. Companies have no respect for anything: skills, education, experience are all totally meaningless to these companies. ALL that matters is money. That's why it takes five interviews and a credit-check to get hired, but only an e-mail to be fired.
Unless, of course, we're discussing the price tags of all these "brands." Then, it's "you get what you pay for." Like $2500 for a mattress and $4500 for a television, $175 for a basket of groceries and $50,000 for a car. It's nonsense, of course, but everyone's too busy arguing about the problem. Nobody is interested in hearing the facts. All that matters is money.
Re:Ok (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a good thing. Read it again: This is a good thing.
Why do they pay you to work? Because you wouldn't do it for free. What happens when people retire? They have enough assets so that they no longer have to work for a living, and so generally promptly quit.
Medieval serfs had 100%, full-time employment. Even better, they were employed 18 hours a day instead of a mere eight. Shame that modern businesses have slashed our workday in hal
Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't a lack of employment, The problem is insufficient compensation to keep you in a human standard of living
Increased productivity is good for keeping business profits up, but it's no good at all for keeping people fed and clothed
Complete nonsense. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you are posting from Sudan or a jail cell in China I just think you have no idea what a human standard of living really is.
People in rich countries, even poor people in relative terms, are well fed (heck obesity is frequently associated with poverty in rich
Re:Ok (Score:2)
No. Those people have to eat and they need a place to live. The fact they have no access to, nor any way to find access to full-time adequate employment is not a good thing.
Increased productivity so that not everyone need be engaged in a constant minute-to-minute struggle for existence every minute of every day is a benefit, not a drawback.
Except for the millions who, in their mid-20s, cannot find stable adequate employment because the only jobs they are "qualified" for, despite
Re:Ok (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ok (Score:2)
Re:Ok (Score:2, Interesting)
Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Commerce.
Context matters... (Score:5, Insightful)
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat1.
And if you'd like to see about part-time workers you can get recent statistics here:
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab5.htm
Please note, there's nothing wrong with a part of the population being employed part time by choice. The BLS statistics differentiate these as people employed part time for economic/non-economic reasons... if you look at the stats you'll see around 4-5 million people are employed part-time for economic reasons. You can find those stats here:
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab5.htm
According to the BLS the labor force is around 150 million:
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab1.htm
Out of a labor force of around 150 million that means that we have about 3-4% of the labor force working part time because they can't get full time work. While I'd prefer this to be a lower percentage, it doesn't seem to be a great and shocking problem.
Also, would you please source your data above. Absent primary sourcing I've absolutely no reaon to believe your facts.
Re:Ok (Score:3, Insightful)
Postmodern(Apple) != Postmodern(Orange) (Score:4, Insightful)
Similarly, the role of "blacksmiths" evolved. Today, you might call them machinists, or perhaps they're the assembly-line workers. You don't see many blacksmiths making auto parts by hand, but then you don't see many bookkeepers calculating General Electric's quarterly results by hand, either.
It's merely a linguistic quirk that we retained the occupational title for "descendant job 1" and not "descendant job 2". Recall that "computers" themselves were once human beings that did arithmetic.
Similarly, programmers aren't going away, though we may stop calling them "programmers" and the day-to-day details of their methods and tools will change.
And if you are concerned simply with a narrow focus on specific methods of today, then programmers have already survived the postmodern shift. As scarce as blacksmiths are professional programmers who key in word values with switches on the front on their machine, and almost as scarce as those that deal with any significant amount of assembly language. Programmers and their tools have already evolved with time, and a modern programmer mucking about in
No Knuth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eric
Thanks to All-Bran, William Shatner 'goes like no man has gone before' [ericgiguere.com]
Re:No Knuth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No Knuth? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the parent does raise a valid point - many of my co-workers are good at putting widgets together and doing similar tasks, but don't really know what to do when they need to think in terms of embedded environments or program optimization.
Oh, I see now. (Score:5, Funny)
At first I thought, "Of course! Everybody knows that." My wife and I were just chatting about that last night before bed. (Maybe the rest of you should use romantic talk like that, and you'd get some more often.)
Then I realized that the author knew way more words than I do. He must be right.
Astroturfing (Score:2, Interesting)
Why is blatent self-promotion reaching the frontpage of slashdot more and more regularly.
Writers! let your readers do your promotion for you, it just looks bad if you do it on your own
Codeless Development (Score:5, Interesting)
The advent of the Codeless Development Environment (CDE)
I wonder if these "Codeless Development" environments are they themselves written in a codeless environment. If you have ever coded in a pure gui environments with boxes and connectors and such you will quickly learn the limitations.
Re:Codeless Development (Score:2)
The new "Codeless Development" coding process:
1) Write a bunch of the code with graphical tools. The tools are handled by monkeys/people who were fired from McDonalds.
2) Hire a coder to do the part you couldn't do without him.
Unfortunately, the coding portion of the codeless development probably ends up longer, because the code it spi
Re:Codeless Development (Score:3, Insightful)
is than using a codeless development environment.
A shiver runs down my spine whenever I hear "without a line of code".
I said something similar last time. (Score:2)
Here's what I said at that time. [slashdot.org]
But anyhow, while I can see this guy's point I don't think the Blacksmith is such a great example because metalworking is still a vital part of the economy. The Blacksmith per se may be a thing of the past, but metalworking, which is what Blacksmiths did, had not diminished at all. It has become such an essential part of so many trades that it is no long
old speech... really old speech... (Score:3, Interesting)
i lost count of how many "friendly" languages were created that would allow a "normal" human being to code, and we still have programers doing the actual work or fixing the snafus of "normal people".
Ok, Ok, it's all my fault... (Score:2, Funny)
Machists (Score:3, Informative)
The need to pump a belows and pound on the iron with a hammer may have vanished, but the need for people skilled at using tools to produce parts for other tools is still filled quite comfortably by machinists.
And they still get paid pretty well.
Switch (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of you have to know that your employers have utter disdain for you by now. If not, keep working and it will become evident o
The analogy is not right (Score:4, Insightful)
While I think that programmers are "evolving", the
analogy with "Blacksmith and the
Bookkeeper" is not right.
Bookkeepers, blacksmiths, even secretaries are
disappearing because their jobs can be automated and computers are taking over.
Programmers are disappearing because of a different reason. It is not because computers are
taking over us; to this day no computer can write a program or fix a bug.
I believe that the problem is that the software is
becoming so complex that what could have been done by one-person years ago, takes a team
these days. I remember that in 1991 I wrote several systems like inventory managers, stuff
like that. Today you require testers, DBA expert, GUI designers...
I think it is more like what happened to the
aviation industry. In the 1900 you could build your own airplane, there were people building
airplanes all over the world. Today, only a few companies can do that,
and the demand for airplane-building skills is gone. Well, not gone,
its just that it has changed, now you have to specialize in some area, you can not know ALL what
is required to build an airplane. ( well, unless you are Burt Rutan)
I think that software is evolving the same.
Eventually we will have to specialize in GUI, or DB or whatever. The generic programmer is not
disappearing, just evolving. ( Read with Hannibal Lecters accent. )
My 2 cents...
-Ale
Again, myths and rumors (Score:4, Insightful)
These judgement day scenarios are based on a big fallacy I haven't yet seen addressed:
The market for software developers is not standing still; it's growing tremendously. We're just not seeing it because a lot of new development is going overseas. However, there's no sign that the demand is going to slow down, and there's not an infinite number of tech workers overseas.
Already Indian workers are concerned about having their own tech bubble, as other countries start coming online with cheaper workers. China, Phillipines, and others are starting to take work away from India.
Further, despite claims to the contrary, it's not just as easy to move programming jobs overseas as it is for manufacturing jobs. Indian programmers aren't just plucked from the trees...they've gone through years of training and education just like we have. It costs a lot more time and money to train a programmer than to train an assembly-line worker. Again, there are not infinite resources available. It just seems that way because India has been building up a highly-trained workforce for a long time--without work to give them.
Our own tech boom and bust resulted in scads of untrained, unskilled workers getting paid too much to do too little. Reality check: there's no such thing as an HTML programmer. Writing VB is not going to earn you $50/hr. If you don't like what you're doing, you're not in the right line of work. The lion's share of jobs lost to offshoring are jobs that were filled by wannabes during the
Finally, as other posts have noted, the cost of paying a programmer is not the largest portion of developing software. Gathering requirements, testing, working with customers and clients, managing change, administering systems; all enter into it and have similar contributions to the overall cost. In the case of offshoring, almost all of these become more expensive...in some cases much more expensive.
Re:Again, myths and rumors (Score:2)
Elsewhere. While the products are advertised to the recently laid-off, constantly.
Writing VB is not going to earn you $50/hr.
Why not? It probably earned my boss twice that, and the shareholders ten times that, each.
that were filled by wannabes during the
You mean wannabe employed?
Their totally right!! (Score:5, Funny)
Look, that technology is already here!!
Behold, a program which is capable of designing a new program!!
#include <stdio.h>
int main ( void )
{
FILE * output = fopen ( "c:\\newprogram.c", "w" );
fprintf ( output, "#include <stdio.h>\nint main ( void )\n{\nprintf(\"hello world!\");\nreturn 0;\n}" );
fclose ( output );
return 0;
}
Were all doomed you fools!!
Re:Their totally right!! (Score:3, Informative)
Oh no, now they're self-replicating! Ruuun!
Re:Their totally right!! (Score:3, Funny)
Only to be expected (Score:3, Interesting)
This DOESN'T mean that programming will become an extinct job classification, but it sure means that the number of jobs will decline.
What's uncertain is the time frame. And nobody knows. I include the author (both me, and the guy who wrote the article).
Who hires people to write the kind of program that spreadsheets can handle? Nobody! (But just last year I automated an office procedure in MSExcel using scripting. Python wasn't portable enough in the desired environments. [I wasn't allowed to install a new language interpreter.])
But notice that there are two complemenatry trends in action:
1) Most of the things that used to be programmed have available general solutions
2) Most of the things that need doing are programmed interaction of higher level tools.
So long as this trend continues, there will be a declining, but continuing, need for programmers.
At some point, though, an AI will become general purpose enough to handle some reasonable subset of the tasks of a programmer. At this point, the job of the programmer will change drastically. At this point a programmer will become one who can describe a task sufficiently well that the atomaton can implement it. This already exists in specific problem domains. Screen painting programs like glade, e.g., but the transition point will occur when the automatic programmer becomes much more general.
We've probably got a decade. Possibly two. I'd be surprised if it takes longer than that.
Naah (Score:3, Insightful)
That time for me was this morning. My clients still appreciate small, fast code that can be developed quickly, doesn't fall over and is agile enough to adapt to new requirements. Most of it is in Python, some of it is in Pyrex or C and yeah, some of it is still in assembly. Assembly is not a waste of time or a hangover from the Apollo days but a useful addition to any coder's arsenal especially given the insight into Leaky Abtractions [joelonsoftware.com] that it brings. YMMV of course - asm is really not required for high-level business apps but it comes in really handy for certain kinds of video processing.
The vast majority of coding today is ignorant of such constraints. A 2K limit for even the simplest of applications -- even those written in Java, which was ostensibly designed to minimize an executable's footprint -- would today be considered absurd. And that's just for the minimalist application. Never mind the JVM, which is sort of required for anything meaningful to occur. But an entire operating system squeezed into 2K? It is obvious that the skills required for a successful programmer in 1969 are very different from the skills required for a successful programmer today.
And yet they're surprisingly similar. Given:
can you do X for us in time T? I contend that all programming is about limitations and overcoming them: whether they be memory, time, operating system capability or human. No super-genetically evolved system is going to replace a smart human anytime soon. This guy needs to do two things: a) learn a real programming language and b) read the Mythical Man Month. There are no silver bullets.
Field far from perfected (Score:3, Insightful)
Go and ask computer users (both novices and professionals) about what they think of the software they use day to day. Most will complain about the software they use (unreliable, unstable, missing essential capabilities...). That alone tells us there is still much more work to be done.
I don't think it matters whether you use UML diagrams, Java, C#. What matters is that everyone in business today is a computer user, and a large percent of these computer users are not happy with the software they are using.
There is plenty of work for those that can solve these problems. IMHO.
The blacksmith also evolved... (Score:2)
I Read this Goofy Article About... (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, I thought... "Aha! He wants to make programming go the way that word processing and data entry did after the 80s". For the youngsters in the audience, believe it or not, but there used to be a very short lived period of time when people went to school to learn how to become word processors or data entry specialists. As soon as GUI based word processing and office suites were released, those people lost their jobs because "anyone could do the tasks". Is that really true though? Read on...
Yes, it is true that pretty much anyone who is plunked down in front of GUI based word processing software or an office suite can build a pretty impressive looking document. It doesn't require schooling anymore, just some introduction and you're off. But, does that mean that same person can design a glossy publication like a magazine or even a well done news letter? No. What about the person who can set up a basic spreadsheet? Would you want them being the DBA for your Oracle database? Probably not. So the titles have changed and the availability of jobs shrunk. I think you're going to see the same thing with programming.
There probably will be a point when the average office jockey will be able to build a basic application for use in their workplace. But that guy isn't going to be a programmer and the program he built isn't going to be efficient, compact or reliable. Programmers will still be needed, but just not in the way that they are now. It's likely that programmers will become more specialized. (Just like you now have graphic design people who are the extension of the more talented word processors of the late 70s) Programmers aren't going to disappear. They are going to become something else.
overly optimistic (Score:3, Interesting)
Goff seems to believe that high-level programming tools and genetic programming will soon eliminate the need for programmers, but nothing I have seen suggests that such tools are anywhere near able to do this. Maybe someday, but not in the near future. What we've really seen is that the combination of more advanced tools and greatly increased computer power has enabled people with very limited skills to do things that would once have required a real programmer. The result is that lots of people can make web pages and create spreadsheets and so forth, but these are essentially all additions to the work that must still be done by real programmers. Real programmers are still needed both for the more difficult tasks and for even fairly simple ones that nobody has taken the trouble to create high-level tools for.
It seems to me that there is a parallel in medicine. With all the modern medicines, tests, and instruments (such as thermometers, blood pressure meters, glucose meters) available to the average person, the non-physician can successfully diagnose and treat many illnesses. This hasn't, however, eliminated the need for real experts to deal with the harder stuff.
BZZT! Wrong, sorry! (Score:5, Insightful)
... from the article, the author states that 'coding is dead' because
Ahh, the mythical Blue Unicorn; users will be able to make their own Uber Apps and developers will sink into the La Brea Tar Pits. That could be the case if development was only banging code. It is actually deconstructing a business process/issue into manageable chunks, then writing code to make those chunks work together. I have yet to meet a business person who can explain the function of their job in a linear process, so there is no way that person could write their own program, unless you had a magical CDE that could translate abstract, random process descriptions into real code (forget about efficient code/processes).
Ahh, the anonymous factory that churns out components that our business person can then assemble into a working application? Been there, tried that with EJB. Somehow that whole promise of component EJBs never really took off. I wonder why? Could it be that this idea is CRAP? Hmm...
Non Sequitur. The number of quality jobs aren't decreasing. The monkeys that thought they could get a MCSE and start making $65k with no experience are (hopefully) flushed out of the pool. Soon the monkeys who are unable to do the work of Business Analyst/Junior Project Manager will also be gone/outsourced. The jobs are there; you just have to know how to look for them [asktheheadhunter.com].
Another non-sequitur. A degree means nothing in terms of fitness for doing a job---except to PHBs who don't know how to judge a candidate's worth other than by dead trees (resume/degree: equally worthless). You can certainly be a good developer without having ever taken one college class. What matters is skill, experience, adaptability, talent, and self motivation to learn new stuff.
More:
Yes, last week, in fact. I've been plowing through Vol 3 looking for a better way to search a bunch of stuff across multiple iSeries/DB2 files. So what? Reading Knuth doesn't mean you're a better code monkey. It can help, but just like any other resource, it is in the application. Einstein said something to the effect that the most important fact one could know is the Library's address.
Heard it all before (Score:3, Interesting)
AI can already pen better articles than this tripe (Score:5, Insightful)
I posit that AI out there can already write articles better than this dreck. So perhaps Dreck writing should already be extinct, but here we yet again see more dreck on
About the time we have code writing AI, we will have passed Vinge Singularity and all professions will be extinct.
I have to wonder if the author ever worked on anything other than web pages. Or very simple coding issues.
I work in telecom with a university educated work force (including PHDs and Masters degrees) and these folks have a tough time building quality systems given the constantly changing requirements , competitive demands and huge complexity of the systems.
Complexity is only increasing as we go forward. In almost any field you now have much larger programming teams working on more complex problems.
This is as Naive as when the thought high level laguages (moving from assembly) Cobol, Visual Basic, OOP, 4GL, 5GL etc... would eliminate programming as a profession.
As the tools became more powerfull, the problem space became more complex. If anything there has been a push beyond the toolsets and coding today is more difficult than it has been in the past, rather than simpler.
Programming large scale complex systems is so difficult now that hardly any groups out there consider it manageable.
If there is any profession where we currently can't easily get a handle on, it is programming in the large. Once you have AI that can handle this, what couldn't it do?
my take on the article (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Automation has NOT been a significant factor in my domain. Code generators are usually used by people who write bloated code to begin with. OOP's poorly-defined relationship with relational databases has also created a demand for tools attempting to bridge that gap by generating code. If anything, this OO/R conflict increased demand for coders. (Note I am not bashing OO here, just saying there is a philosophical conflict with relational that has yet to be resolved, resulting in tedious translation efforts.)
3. AI is irrelavant because cheaper bandwidth means that machines and people can hook up with cheap overseas human brains. Why invent cheap brains when we have billions of starving eager brains around the world?
4. I don't see bookkeeping safe from the same forces. As more and more transactions are electronic, your bookkeeper can be in Asia also, along with the coders. Programmers may be the first hit, but I doubt they will be the last.
Goff has no idea what he is talking about (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, Goff knows nothing about the practice of computing science. But he still manages to hawk out three crappy articles about it. Which get on the /. frontpage... Man, that guy is good.
The arguement is flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, we don't have many blacksmiths, but let's look at the role of a blacksmith:
All they did was make things out of metal. They were what we now replaced with machines. The few innovative blacksmiths, who created new advances, were what are now engineers. Nothing has changed - only evolved. And what was once a role for a person is no longer.
Now, you are saying that there will be no need for programmers in the same sense of how we no longer need blacksmiths. But I ask you, do we have a programmer re-type every line of code for each and every piece of software that is sold? Because that would be the role of a 'blacksmith' programmer.
A programmer (or large group of) writes the first piece of software, which must usually be innovative, or better then what exists, in order to provide a use. Sure, there are countless pieces of code being re-written, or written poorly, but that is more for learning than for business, at least if they plan to survive. And when there are copies of software in the mainstream it is merely for economical competition, which will never change.
With the open source movement, or even with API's of old, there is no need to write every line of code over again, but rather to use them to make whatever new piece of software it is that you are planning to make. This involves making software that has never existed, which cannot be automated.
So I conclude that software programmers have never from the start been blacksmiths, or at least have not been for a very long time. What we provide is a constantly changing, evolving, and adapting use of logic in the form of code. No automation will ever replace that.
The number of programmers will not be decreasing to extremely low numbers either, since the more advanced software becomes the harder it is for individuals to create it. Large groups are required, for long periods of time (How long does it take to make a new game or operating system compared to 20 years ago).
You argument is not only wrong in practice, but wrong in theory. It's ridiculous.
Some Vogon poetry, please! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm begging someone to take away this blow-hard's keyboard.
Rockstars and Orchestral Musicians (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the advent of recorded music, if you wanted music, you paid musicians to come around and play it for you. It was expensive to keep them, they became status symbols, but they were commonplace in wealthy households and courts.
After recorded music came, the number of musicians required dropped off amazingly. Just tanked.
Programmers are increasingly headed in that direction because of automation: better and better libraries, software packages with increased configurability, better management of software projects. It's gradually getting easier to make a given problem go away with fewer and fewer programmers.
The countertendancy - as large problems become cheaper to solve, more people pay for them to be solved - is sustaining us for the moment, but there is no guarentee that those two forces will remain in step indefinitely.
But even in the age of fluidly configurable, massively integrated software packages (try: Apache 2, MySQL4 and WordPress - millions of lines of code with a nice user interface, and all it does is run your blog) there's still a need for the "rockstars" - the programmers who actually produce those systems.
Professional musicians these days have to fight to stay in the game, and they have to be really, really good at *something* even if it's just pouting on posters.
Programming is going the same way: it's no longer the easy option. If you're programming right now for a reason other than "I'm really good at this" or "I love this" and, preferably, both - get out of the game while you still have an income. You have less than ten years, possibly more like five.
Two more jobs, if you're lucky.
But for the rest of us? The people who can hack it under these conditions? I think it's going to be a return to the Golden Age of Hacking - the time when it was a game for the profoundly talented and educated - rather than these hordes of analgorithmic munchkins we've been competing with for years.
Rock star programmers, dude. Not garage mechanics, rock stars. You can see it already in the celebrity accorded to people like Linus, or EvHead. As software is increasingly "one hit, one kill" - packages which simply dominate an entire category - that kind of rapid rise and fall is going to be the norm, rather than the exception, in the publically popular software sphere.
That's the rock star niche.
And the rest of us will be like those touring rock bands you see all over America, or the players at your local symphony hall.
pompous and vapid at the same time (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the author was rewarded in school for writing long sentences with big, trendy words. This sort of ridiculous blather is the result.
Some of my favorites:
uh-huh
Sure, they'll mechanize that one any day...
Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously though. I believe that the same things he uses to point to the demise of the programmer could also be applied to his test case of the bookkeeper. I believe that it would be nearly as easy to create a "bookkeeping factory" as it would be to truly create a "Programmer factory". But, I don't believe that either of them are going to happen any time soon.
Other pieces of his logic are suspect as well. Yes there has been a decline in the number of computer science students enrolled, but the article doesn't say if that statistic takes into account the number of students enrolled in Information Technology majors, or other related majors. I know that a lot of the students that started in Computer Science with me eventually switched to Business Information Technology to avoid having to take all the math required in CS.
Problems with the Analogy andf more.. (Score:3, Interesting)
We today have welders and all the related fields of metal working that back then did not exist.
Also the writer seems to have skipped over the 300 year lapse between the introduction of the hindu-arabic decimal system and its finally becomming mainstream over the roman numeral system. Hmmm, seems the elitest roman numeral accountants pursued the lies and arguements that it is silly to think that nothing "zero" can have value....
It should be noted that roman numeral mathmatics is so limited that we could have never developed computers with it.
I also noted in skimming over the article that the writer mentions the "software factory" in MS terms.... this two is with error for a number of reasons, the least of which is not the fact the the book being referenced uses "pattern" as a catch all phrase where as a matter of convience it is converted to various things thruout the book.
MS is a market company first and formost and a third party integrator second. MS's POV on software factories is with distortion of reality and biasing towards MS, rather then honesty about "putting things together" in a manner that automates alot more of what a programmer wouold otherwise do manually ---- but then isn't the act of programming the goal of creating automations of complexity, typically made up of simpler complexities, and done so in order to make the use and reuse of teh complexity easy for the users of the complexity.... hence a natural evolution of the field of programming....rather than an MS invention...
I'd imagine this is enough to bring doubt to the writers message, but I'm sure there is more in error..... though hey.... it sound sooooo good.....
Some kinds of programming are already dead. But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, no. Instead, he worked on more sophisticated analyses, software that didn't fit in Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3.
Time after time over the decades there's been predictions that some new productivity tool was going to replace programmers. It hasn't happened. Because what a programmer does, basically, is to do the things that people havethought up that haven't yet become popular enough or common enough to be canned in a tool.
The advent of the Codeless Development Environment
If what you're doing doesn't involve code, it's not development, it's configuration. And that's great, because having programmers wasting time on configuration is a drag on productivity. Anything you already know how to do, that you've already written code to do, you don't do it again. If you do, well, that's a problem you need to fix, write a program to do it, go on to something else...
I know a blacksmith and he ain't extinct (Score:5, Interesting)
There may come a time when we need fewer programmers, like blacksmiths. But those that are will be special "craftsman". We'll just have to change our style to fit with the times.
Adapt or die...the way of nature.
Sean D.
smithy != smith (Score:3, Informative)
Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
He asks how many people are acquainted with a bookkeeper, and how many are acquainted with a blacksmith. No, I'm not acquainted with many blacksmiths. How many mechanical engineers, or mechanics am I acquainted with? More than bookkeepers, I'm afraid.
The trade of blacksmithing, where one person forges, casts and manufactures something, cradle to grave, is largely gone. However, there are an extensive number of people in this world who know how to shape metal into useful things; I believe they're better known, these days, as engineers. They may not do the actual bending, machinging, forging, etc., but they do the design, which is something a blacksmith did. Also, mechanics may not manufacture their parts (something to which the author alludes), but blacksmiths were ALSO responsible for repairing existing items. Sometimes, that meant fabricating a part, sometimes that meant taking a pre-fabricated part and applying it (or modifying a similar part) to get it working. Mechanics do that, these days, and they have a much larger catalog of pre-fabricated parts to work with, so they don't typically NEED to fabricate a part for the job. Although, in my shade-tree mechanic experience, I've been known to take an existing, not-quite-what-I-needed part, and make it work.
So, while the trade of blacksmithing, as a cradle-to-grave manufacturer, mechanic and engineer has diminished, the different roles they played have spawned their own career fields. Engineers use machines to produce much larger quantities of parts than traditional craftsmen could manage, and their quality is more consistent. Is this the demise of a trade, or simply the application of technology to improve its productivity? I would argue that, if you took all the people who are now working in roles which blacksmiths once filled, the various sub-fields of blacksmithing have MORE people working in it than the bookkeeping field.
I develop websites, for internal use, for my employer. The language and technologies I use were pretty well evolved before I finished college and went to work in this career field. I don't have to code machine language or even assembly; some other developer developed the tools I use. Because I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time my boss wants a new web app, my productivity is much higher. The original programmers were the "blacksmiths" of this field; they created some practical, useful things for their clients, and they create tools which improved their own productivity. Their tools led to the development of other tools. Consequently, there are few if any programming "blacksmiths" in the world today; most all programmers are engineers, mechanics, or factory workers feeding the automated systems. The titles just haven't changed; that's all.
As for bookkeeping not being as ripe for automation, how many bookkeepers do you know who would be willing to go back to pen and paper? Give up their calculators? Give up their computers? I'm willing to be the answer is very few. Their field has also benefitted from automation; a bookkeeper today, with his computers and software, is at least a couple orders of magnitude more productive than an old "quill and paper" bookkeeper of a couple centuries ago. However, the title has changed little, although the career has changed significantly.
As a programmer, I see the technologies I'm working with evolving on a regular basis; I have to adapt to those changes, like the bookkeeper in his analogy. Does that mean that my career will become extinct? I sincerely doubt it; I'll probably be more productive ten years from now, but I sincerely doubt that an automated softwar
It's opposite day (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically the argument goes, "in the *future*, things will get more automated so there will be no need for programmers. Programmers are like [insert lousy analogy] and in future will become obsolete just like [insert lousy analogy]."
The whole point of programming is identifying that which can be automated and eliminating the need for mindless repetition. It's almost a tautology to say that the hardest thing of all to automate is the process of reducing what used to be considered a difficult labour/thought intensive process into a program. To do this requires a greater level of understanding than whatever job is being automated. We will write software to deliver packages, perform surgery, teach mathematics to children, etc etc, but until computers are smarter than humans we will never write software that figures out how to write software *for novel applications*. I think its nearer the truth to say that eventually everybody except programmers will become redundant.
This is good thing by the way, it only seems like a bad thing due to our economy which is designed for optimal distribution of scare resources. Until we rejig economics to deal with a post scarcity society, we are doomed to invent bullshit filltime work to make up for all the professions that are made redundant [but that's another story...]
Global Economy (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a very narrow view on what is happening and will happen with a very large number of jobs in the Global Economic structure that has arrived since the 1990's. If you want, you can consider this whole process a Canary in a Coal Mine example of what is going to happen to most jobs in the US and all other first world nations.
There are still blacksmiths in the world today, but the economy supports a much lower density of blacksmiths today in the nation. The only way that the few blacksmiths today can manage to survive is if they are very good and have more of an artistic quality to their nature than a pure smithy skillset.
The only way any American developers will survive is if they have exceptional skills that makes tham capable of competing on a much more competative market or are able to find a density of developers low enough in the local area that they are able to do all the customization work necessary to support the local demand of the software industry.
But the days of every geek making 6 digits a year have long past. It's just as well if you ask me. Now the only people who will code are the people who do it because they love it, not because they can get paid for it. I've run into a lot of pretty useless individuals who have moved into software development because they took a 6 week course in MCSE or JAVA and got picked up by some contract house.
The people that will be left working on software development in countries like US, Canada, and most of the European nations that participate in the Global Economy will follow this pattern.
In this case, the analogy must be almost perfect! (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end, the blacksmith and the bookkeeper are only convenient metaphors, not to be confused with inherently meaningful symbols. Any number of contrasting metaphors may have served just as well.
Umm, no. This essay purports to draw an analogy between blacksmiths and programmers, with a contrast to bookkeepers. In the end, the analogy better be as close to perfect as possible. You don't get to cop out in the last paragraph of a three-part essay! If the blacksmith isn't perfectly analogous to a programmer, then keep looking -- you haven't found your analogy yet!
A more accurate analogy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Like somebody else said, programmers will become more like the engineers who take common components and put them together, only sometimes making any low level changes to the common parts.
Yeah, it was great when we all did amazing things with our 2K of program space in assembly code. I really miss those days. But I dont want to do that anymore than I want to design and fabricate a gear so I can build a robot. Now certainly there are going to be a few people somewhere who need to design things like that, on a low level.
You can find all sorts of similar analogies. How about textiles? Do you know anybody who makes their own fabrics? Do you know anybody who makes their own clothing and who laments the fact that they dont get to weave the fabric first?
I'd rather stand on the shoulders of giants -- and create bigger and better things using the components people have perfected before me.
When I first started to read this article (which I found tedious to read) I thought sh!t, he's right! And then I realized I'll still be programming in the future, just using more tools than low level programming. Already I use code generators and libraries of functions and object components. Programming will be more like engineering the overall structure, or designing the data base or protocols, etc. That's more fun anyway.
Nostalgia aside, hooray for the death of the programmer! Long live the Software Engineer!
Re:The Future for Nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if once nerds lose their jobs and therefore their money, they will return to the bottom of the social pyramid again.
I'm not sure if you're just trying to troll, but there is a lot of truth in this. When I was in my 20's, before so many people were making so much money with software, a nerd was an extremely pejorative term to call someone. Today people in our industry get so much more respect. I fear that once money starts leaving high tech, we will again be returned to this position.