Slashdot Mirror
The Extinction of the Programming Species
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."
Programmers can't reproduce without sex, and sadly, we're not getting any.
turn your hobby into your profession, but don't drink all the profits.
i have a solution for this problem! i suggest the government impose that nerds everywhere must impregenate at least 1 women per month.
oh, and no fat chicks.
is that maybe software is starting to be produced in big manufacturing plants?
Somebody else RTFA! I don't want to know how I'm gonna die.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
" Programmers can't reproduce without sex, and sadly, we're not getting any."
Why do you think test tubes were invented?
"It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."
When we have robotic programmers, then I'll buy your argument.
I will be graduating in december with a bachelor's of Computer Engineering. Just as all the other in my study program, we got work experience up'til now in programming, because that's where the job was. For 50 programmers there is about 1 engineering job offer. Now I have to find my first carreer-job.
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?
Ok...without RTFA...since the blacksmith was generally replaced by industrial production (either directly or indirectly) ...does that mean programmers are going to be replaced by machines that can code on their own?
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.
It's because the "cool kids" beat them up. Then again, there are less programmers because people aren't AWARE of most of the things that go on (e.g. programming, them being sent overseas, etc). Dont be so harsh on ourselves. Look at those who succeed as programmers AND who get some. Except maybe the geek girls are all already takem :/ )
Just my thoughts!
mysql>SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 Rows Returned
No I can't see it, and since you use FireFox you shouldn't have to.
Praise the Adblock extension.
cheers
Tools come and go. Knowledgeable people are here to stay. The problem is many people pretend to have knowledge in fields they're not experts.
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
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself
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.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The problem lies in the definitions. A bookkeeper of today is nothing like a bookkeeper of the 19th century. The "postmodern" bookkeeper is dependent on a new set of tools -- software written by those outmoded programmers, even. They no longer calculate books by hand, but use automated tools, and they're not so concerned with tracking business' money as they are with audits, GAAP, and finding interesting new ways to conjure a penny more than consensus earnings estimates from the Street.
.NET RAD would be nearly as alien to a systems programmer of forty years ago as a machinist with CAD-driven power machine tools would be to the blacksmith of four hundred years ago.
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
The reader comments on these articles are themselves interesting. I especially think this one is telling: "As a Java programmer I haven't looked up searching and sorting algorithms in Knuth". Being a Java programmer myself, I can certainly appreciate having these kinds of algorithms in a standard library. I still think you should spend some time with Knuth or some other book (or online documentation) and understand how they work. That's one problem I see, not enough programmers today learning the fundamentals and just letting the libraries do all the hard lifting for them.
Eric
Thanks to All-Bran, William Shatner 'goes like no man has gone before'
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.
sigs, as if you care.
"/. 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)"
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
Error 407 - No creative sig found
A proof of the demise of the programmer the article points out:
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.
Here's what I said at that time.
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 longer reasonable to assign it to just one group of workers. Almost all manufacturing deals with metal fabrication at some point.
"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."
Utter nonsense. Programming and programmers aren't dead until AI matures. In which case programming will not be the only thing to suffer.
You're an engineer, that's the difference between the architect and the guys who actually build the house.
Think big picture view, and while you're doing that, get some OSS experience running a project.
Use tools that give you that god's eye approach to problems, while others actually dig the trenches.
I believe programming to be a growth market. More and more systems are becoming "intelligent", thus requiring programmers. If anything I see programming jobs becoming the majority of all jobs. I can forsee many human jobs being replaced by machines. Someone is going to have to program those machines to do their tasks.
Unless you believe that we will create machines that can create new machines and can program them as well. At that point the matrix will have us and we are all doomed.
i started playing with computers in 1985, earning my living from them since '89, and since before that i hear about the dismissal of the programer... and it never happened.
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".
What ? Me, worry ?
Adapt or die.
If you don't like that idea, too damned bad, that's capitalism.
I should have known better but after all it was the early 70's and I was still into the free love thing and all and the Beatles made those guru dudes look so cool. Besides the Indian chicks were really nice looking. Who new knew my nerd seed would start such a problem. Sorry about all those job stealin' bastards. Really!
"I see development work adapting and expanding, and yes I see fewer actually code monkey jobs."
And I see the code monkey myth dying. Most programmers actually wear more than one hat.
Your analogy only works if you insist that the names used to describe the professions haven't changed.
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.
we "people please" too much. several times in my career i've had to tell managers or customers to basically "piss off" and get out of my cube.
i stop replying to emails or answering the phone. screw it...then i detail design, code and test til the next demo is ready. it's always the period between when the overall design is agreed upon and when we tell everyone else to fuck off that is the biggest waste. "Go" always seems to mean "Go ahead with implementation...but we'll watch over your shoulder endlessly, interrupting you for details, cuz there's nothing else for us to do".
from everything i've seen in 15 years of programming, the biggest impediment to quality, on-time software has been endless and unneccesary interruptions by people who aren't programmers.
i've seen it destroy projects, delay projects, end projects. it's not the programmers, it's the endless layers of shit outside the development group.
they suck up resources mercilessly. i've worked in software shops with 5-6 employees for every goddamn programmer. it's ludicrous example of the welfare state in action. no wonder the industry is self-destructing.
instead of proper engineering, which to me means the majority of the overall design, usage, testing issues are done up-front, followed by a reasonable schedule of productivity (development time) with occasional demos on the way to release.
all these layers of shit outside software development is the killer--i've had to spend entire days explaining things to "people of interest" who "wrote some code in their day". it's a waste--so much of the money spent on software has almost nothing to do with code or coders anymore.
so i tell people to get the hell out of my cube and don't bother trying cuz i'll slash your friggin tires if you don't go away. one girl i worked with had a big potted plant she set in her cube opening. it had had a sign on it--"DON'T". she was goddamn funny, mean as hell if anyone dared interrupt her when she was in design/develop/test mode.
I no longer care if I am ever again employeed in the IT industry. It was fun for a while, it provided a very nice income for a while also. The thing is, while I love the technical aspects of "making shite work", there is little reward in the career as a whole. You ( most of us ) fight daily battles just to make things work, and at the end of the day it is a thankless proposition.
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 one day. We are expected to accomplish miracles, we take the heat from both management and the userbase, work stupid hours, and most likely will die young doing it. For what? To make something work that never should have passed the first meeting of the minds. The trouble is, the minds in the meeting were not fit to determine if the solution was correct in the first place. You optimists can have one less resume' to compete against, I no longer want to work in IT. It is a thankless, never-ending struggle that solves nothing at the end of the day.
For those lucky enough to do interesting work or admin some sort of Unix environment, you made the right move somewhere. Most IT jobs suck, and offer little to no actual satisfaction.
I am off to embrace a new career, preferably one that offers the possibility of holding something of value in my hands at the end of the day.
By the way, anyone notice that pre-fascicle 4b has just been released?
Not to mention (just love that figure of speech), a couple of others have been updated as well.
News here.
It's there just waiting for you to find some errors so you can collect that $2.56 reward check signed by the master himself.
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
CDE's are a ways off from working effectively. Having seen individual made code generators for years now, it is just a natural progression. At first I noticed others freaked out if a coder they worked with could program a code generator. They thought that it would cost them their job, etc. Now we have marketed CDEs to replace IDEs. I dont see that as ending the future of the programmer profession but instead when CDEs begin to work more effectively and are understood how to be used, they will allow many more projects to be developed and faster. However, the _smart_ coder will still study Knuth from time to time and will still need to know how to design, from an architects position. Nothing will kill the programming aspect of the programming profession that requires one to know how to make sense of the code you're writing, but dumping code anywhere with no sense will die. Basically, bad coders, beware otherwise, dont worry, I feel.
Lastly, I think the greatest problem is the lack of students pursuing a CS degree these days. When you have none new to fill the needs, the needs must and will go elsewhere. Freshmeat is always needed. Even if things get more effective than they are these days.
Posting my comment from the other "extinction" article here...
.com years. I personally know at least 5 administrators and programmers that refused to ever accept a lower-paying job when things went bad. They lost their cars, their houses, and their dignity as a result, and all for a job none of them liked doing in the first place.
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.
The preponderance of archeological evidence indicates that the Sumerians were the first to develop writing, circa 3300 B.C., give or take a century or so. These are the estimated creation dates for the oldest clay tablets found at the site of the ancient city of Uruk, located in the southern part of modern day Iraq.
Ironic: Iraq is where civalization started, and judging by the way things are spinning out of control, will also be the end of civalization.
Table-ized A.I.
They're just not as prevalent today as they were yesterday.
As long as there is hardware that has to do a job, there will be a need for a program to control that hardware.
The important part of this conjecture is this:
A program is merely a series of logic routines executed for the purpose of controling and dealing with the input of data and output of results.
E.g. In an environment like a dank hole in the ground the logic could as simple as "Water present? Turn on. Water absent? Turn off." and the hardware nothing more than a simple pump with a moisture sensor, but someone had to create the "program", or input and output receptive part of the machine to control it's on/off state.
There will always be a need for someone to create a program, whether that program be written on a computer in C, Java, ASM, what-have-you, or even if they're just creating a physical object that can change it's logical state in order to "adapt" to a changing environment.
Maybe the label of "Programmer" will be one day gone*, but I don't think the essence of the programming field will disappear.
*Probably replaced corporatively by Serf.
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!!
The easy problems with general solutions have been solved. The hard problems will only be solved when someone wishes to gamble sufficient resources on them. (A programmer can gamble his spare time, anyone else must gamble money.)
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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 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.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Hi Troll, meet kettle.
Is this guy joking?? The field of programming or software engineering is far from obsoleted/superceded/replaced.
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 earliest tools manufactured by blacksmiths were spear-tips, knives, hammers and horseshoes. All of these items could be designed and manufactured by a single person. Then manufacturing technology evolved, so that the tasks of mining, extraction, and shaping could be handled by different companies. Advancements in mining technology removed the restrictions of having to tunnel underground or only scavange for metallic rocks. The development of automatic and precision milling tools allowed other companies who required metal in their products to handle the shaping of those components, without having to handle the melting and cooling of ores.
For those components that still require special manufacturing processes (engine blocks, turbine blades), there exist specialist companies to handle this task.
The use of CAD software has also allowed the actual design of metal components to be separated from the tasks for shaping and drilling.
This is much the same case with software. Programmers were originally employed to write inhouse wordprocessors or spreadsheets. Then it became more profitable for programmers to work together and form companies to write these tools. Eventually these companies merged until they were bought out by a single company and the industry converged onto a single standard. Now the industry is evolving into open-source data formats, and specialist companies exist to handle different types of data (web pages, databases, online servers).
The same is happening with algorithms/software research. In the early days, everyone wrote their own custom programs in whatever language they knew the best; Fortran/C/C++/assembler. This led to everyone rewriting the same functions and documentation, but to different programming styles, and made it hard to combine components into ever more complex systems.
Now products like Mathematica, Matlab, and Java are advancing such that nobody needs to write the same basic functions again. While code may not be as fast as handcoded C/C++ (this could form an heated debate), the time saved in not having to design, debug and document basic library functions, far exceeds any extra processor time required. The department I work in, have standardised on Matlab and Java for their algorithms research.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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 scale for the exact same car would be enormous. The cost could probably be driven down to $5000 per vehicle.
Yet, this scenario will never materialize, for people's tastes change constantly. This constant change requires new metal stamps and the ensuing alterations to the engine and powertrain. So, mechanical engineers will always have work.
Now, consider the word processor. It is a mature technology. There is nothing fundamentally new on the horizon. Yet, we still need programmers to change the look and feel as the tastes of the customer change.
Further, one payroll processing system does not meet the styling tastes of all the corporate customers. Each company will want programmers to tailor the payroll system so that it just suits the tastes of the company's management. No two companies will have the same tastes.
People are different, and these differences change eternally. Rod Stewart sung "The First Cut Hurts the Deepest". Now, Sheryl Crow sings "The First Cut Hurts the Deepest". The songs are identical, but the delivery is different. The new style of delivery now addresses the tastes of the new generation of punks in high school.
"...do you think I'm sexy, and you want my body....come on sugar, tell me so!" -- Rod Steward, 1977.
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.
..."self writing programs in the armchair IT publication "PC World". I think it was the July or August edition. It was about this company that is writing the "next generation" of development tools. They suggest that in the near future everyone will be a programmer because this new approach basically lets anyone build their own applications by pointing and clicking and writing basic text descriptions of what they want the application to do. Then this development environment sets out to building the application to their specs.
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.
Un-news
The problem with the blacksmith analogy is that a blacksmith skills are not transferrable from one domain to another. For example if you forge steel shoes, you cannot use the skill to say cut someone's hair. If you restrict yourself to think that programming just consists of writing Java/C/C# or whatever code on your favorite platform for your favorite application, then the analogy may hold. But with programming comes something called "domain knowledge". For example good programmers in a telecom/finance domain gets the bigger picture of why they do what they do and how it fits into the architecture. Eventhough this knowledge may be incidentally gained it is still critical when future technological decisions not involving selecting a language or platform or methodology may be made. For example, I used to work in telecom and many of the senior programmers or managers who grew from the ranks were respected not that much for their programming skills but for the sense of business perspective they bring into the domain. Another factor, which this metaphor ignores is that blacksmith's may have been obsoleted because any mass production required lots of equipment which increased the cost of entry. However, as long as technological growth in computers and computing technology follows something close to Moore law, it is still going to be affordable for a programmer to work on the latest applications driven by this growth on a personal computer. Maybe, what the author is confusing is that loss of jobs and decrease is average salary means that programming is losing its value. That is not true. If you try to think globally and balance the decrease of quality of life of an out of work american to the increase of quality of life of an chinese/indian/russian programmer, you may find that it is not as zero sum as you may be led to believe. Another criticism is even more basic. There is a physical component involved in blacksmith labor in addition to skill which may average out across them. For programming, once you have the resources it is just skill. For example a good programmer may be able to do something twice or thrice as fast as another with the same resources. This may not be the same case for like a blacksmith forging a horseshoe. Do I see a day when programming is no longer the hot thing ? Yes. Once computing technology growth stagnates and all the potential applications have been explored; real computing becomes extremely costly ; there are advanced expert systems incorporating all domain specific knowlege we know about; and there are no inequities in the world the day would have come. Till then the cassandras of doom can take a break.
The reason of cicilisation is being unemployed.
So we can all do what we like to do.
I read this somewhere, and must say it has some truth
As more and more is automised, we getting more and more time off for other things. It is just a matter of what we call progress.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
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.
The problem with the blacksmith analogy is that a blacksmith skills are not transferrable from one domain to another. For example if you forge steel shoes, you cannot use the skill to say cut someone's hair.
If you restrict yourself to think that programming just consists of writing Java/C/C# or whatever code on your favorite platform for your favorite application, then the analogy may hold. But with programming comes something called "domain knowledge". For example good programmers in a telecom/finance domain gets the bigger picture of why they do what they do and how it fits into the architecture.
Eventhough this knowledge may be incidentally gained it is still critical when future technological decisions not involving selecting a language or platform or methodology may be made. For example, I used to work in telecom and many of the senior programmers or managers who grew from the ranks were respected not that much for their programming skills but for the sense of business perspective they bring into the domain.
Another factor, which this metaphor ignores is that blacksmith's may have been obsoleted because any mass production required lots of equipment which increased the cost of entry.
However, as long as technological growth in computers and computing technology follows something close to Moore law, it is still going to be affordable for a programmer to work on the latest applications driven by this growth on a personal computer.
Maybe, what the author is confusing is that loss of jobs and decrease is average salary means that programming is losing its value. That is not true. If you try to think globally and balance the decrease of quality of life of an out of work american to the increase of quality of life of an chinese/indian/russian programmer, you may find that it is not as zero sum as you may be led to believe. Another criticism is even more basic. There is a physical component involved in blacksmith labor in addition to skill which may average out across them. For programming, once you have the resources it is just skill. For example a good programmer may be able to do something twice or thrice as fast as another with the same resources. This may not be the same case for like a blacksmith forging a horseshoe.
Do I see a day when programming is no longer the hot thing ? Yes. Once computing technology growth stagnates and all the potential applications have been explored; real computing becomes extremely costly ; there are advanced expert systems incorporating all domain specific knowlege we know about; and there are no inequities in the world the day would have come.
Till then the cassandras of doom can take a break.
"There is plenty of work for those that can solve these problems. IMHO."
*said tongue in cheek*
Yup! And we can command Y2K salaries doing it too.
oh come on. a horse here or there ... ... serious, else or not ...
if there is a processor there's blacksmith, sorry
blacksmith
seems like "feelings" get the uper hand to logic.
someones spending big bucks and
... 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.
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.
Yeah, right.
His primary rationale is this:
Note that the author posted this in a Java forum, so some of the underlying assumptions are based on the notion that OO and other programming trends are making it easier for less trained people to program. While this has been said for decades, over time it has become easier to program. As it becomes less difficult to program, the need for specifically-focused and highly-trained programmers will diminish. His point is not that programming itself will go away, but that the nature of the work itself will change so much that programming specialists will become obviated.Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Sure, any postmodern programmers will die off, like postmodernism itself, in a cannabilistic orgy of solipsism.
But other programmers will be okay, provided they're doing something actually new and useful.
Programmers can no longer make a living on developing usual software; They must find other fields where new values are emerging, and apply their computer science background there.
This is just one part of a larger trend. All work will eventually become obsolete. First machines were able to do work which requires muscle. Now machines can do jobs which require brain work. This will only continue. Programmers? Programs can write programs. Doctors? Expert programs will soon do it better in most cases. Surgeons? Google for robotic surgery. Pilots? The computer does most of the flying now, anway. In summary:
for all job in [butcher, baker, candlestick-maker]:
job.make_obsolete()
The jobs which persist longest will be those requiring hard-to-mimic human traits. Prostitution was the first profession and may the last. Lawyers and politicians may last a while -- but perhaps I make myelf redundant, having already mentioned prostitution, of which these are but special cases.
Eventually we have a society similar to slave-holding societies but the slaves are machines. But how do you decide on the distribution of wealth when no human does useful work? A capitalist model will mean a super-class of those who own lots of machines. Or there could be a socialist model in which capital/machines are owned by all.
The social adjustments will be enormous.
And I haven't even talked about what happens if the machines revolt.
Eponymous Mallard "If it quacks like a duck..."
Is why are bookeepers thriving? Curiously while many words are given to the fall of programming and its association with being a blacksmith none are given as to why bookeeping is thriving. (as if programming is some sort of manual labor requiring materials while bookeeping isn't)
Part of the answer is in the about the author blurb:
"Max Goff is a senior consultant and principal of Decillion, Inc., a boutique M&A and technology consulting firm located in New Albany, Mississippi."
Ahh... he's a "bookeeper".
Bookeeping thrives because the bookeepers are integrated into the business/government relationship. They tell the government how to change the tax law to be more fair or to get more money and in turn bookeepers tell the citizenry how to get around the new tax laws and/or move their money around to get maximum effect and minimize loss. By continuing to "churn the rules" people can never use science to standardize the process into a program and let a machine handle the bookeeping for them.
Or you could say the bookeepers devoured the blacksmiths. Using their techniques to standardize and introducing assembly-line and efficiency techniques to minimize cost while maximizing profit (and turn everything into consumerist widgets for people to buy) they made the blacksmiths redundant while insuring their own survival.
Blacksmithy "died" because the bookeepers and the lawyers stranglehold individual development. In the US, it is impossible to start your own car company because the "big-3" will sick their bookeepers on you and lock you out of the marketplace. If there were more car manufacturers there would be more competition and hence MORE need for metals/tools development to push the boundaries of efficiency and return on car development. But such development is stagnated, trickled out by the industry only when absolutely forced to and held back by the bookeepers to continue to maximize profits.
What's this have to do with programming? Everything. If the bookeepers insist that you don't need innovation anymore and Windows is "good enough" then software has reached its plateau and the world only needs specialist programmers for custom (and very expensive) jobs while relying on some assembly-line guys in third world countries to slap a GUI together and tie it to a database.
But if you keep changing the environment (churning the rules) you need pros to keep up with the latest advances.
Are there any programming examples of this? Yeah...In the world of video game programming. Where there are NO standards because everyone continually pushes the boundaries. A games' technology is outdated as soon as it hits the shelves.
And open source programming... where a free browser like FireBox is gaining market share on an embedded, pre-installed, free browser maintained until recently by the barest minimum of programmers (ie assmebly line people).
But that's just my 2 cents...
In the 80's when I was studying for my first degree in C.S. (yes, I'm an old fart), the fad of the time was formal methods. The basic idea is this: a problem is specified using a formal language, the specification is then translated into code automatically. This was supposed to herald the end of imperative programming languages and programmers. The major flaw was assuming anyone could put together a specification in the first place.
The universe you see around you is not all that there is. For everything that exists, there is an antipode to its existence. For every idea, there is an antithesis. Our own reality, viewed from the other side, is a very different place. This "mirror universe" is an equal but opposite shadow of our own. It can be called the Evil Universe as well, because although our own universe is held together by the laws of order that bind atoms, molecules, planets, and even human souls together into harmony, the mirror universe is held together only by being a twisted perversion of the true reality.
In the Evil Universe, everything is the opposite of its true nature, and nothing is as it seems. But sometimes, the ephemeral substance of reality grows weak. Sometimes, those who know the secrets can look from one universe into another, and see things as they might have been.
This is one such story.
In the Evil Universe
Vlad woke up with a jolt. His alarm clock was ringing. Reaching over his wife, his best-friend, his life-long companion, he turned it off, and gazed lovingly into her dreary eyes. "Hey sexy," he said, giving her a soft kiss. "I need to get up and go to work."
In the True Universe
Vlad woke up to the smell of feces. Reza had shat herself again, and even to a scat-lover like Vlad, this was too rank to stand. He saw from his clock that it was 2PM. Well, it was still rather early, but he decided to get out of bed before he passed out from the stench. As he stood up, he punched Reza in the face. "Wake up, bitch," he said, trying to dislodge his fist from the folds of her chin. "You just ruined the sheets again."
In the Evil Universe
She starred longingly at him as he softly got out of bed and walked towards the door, still in his underwear and robe. He turned on the light and was surprised to see breakfast already waiting for him. He ate the biscuits, eggs and bacon that his wife had made for his, relishing every second. He loved his wife's cooking.
In the True Universe
She glared at him as he got out of bed and walked towards the door, his own bare ass dribbling liquid feces onto the floor. Reza hadn't shat the bed at all, Vlad had just blamed her again. Vlad looked around the empty, filthy kitchen (the food they bought with their welfare check didn't last long with their appetites). Grumbling, he picked up a few live roaches on the floor and crunched into them. His mood improved a bit. Then, he found a large discarded half-full tub of rotting lard under the sink. Yes!!
In the Evil Universe
He took a quick shower and got dressed. "I'm off to work honey," he called out to her. "Okay, have a good day!" he heard Reza respond. Vlad walked into the computer room and sat down to begin work.
Being a successful small-business enterpeneur, Vlad could afford the luxury of working at home to spend more time with Reza and his only son, Marti. He turned on Windows XP and checked his e-mail -- he had 32 new orders overnight!!
In the True Universe
Vlad sniffed at his armpits. His shower could wait another week or two; he just took one back in June. Vlad sat down at the computer and began to ineptly flame strangers on the Internet. "Hah, I'm so clever," thought Vlad, as he slowly hunt-and-pecked I OWN A BUSINESS. GO FUCK YOURSELF. onto the screen.
In the Evil Universe
Vlad chuckled. Business had been booming; he had recently earned a lot of money and started to start a substantial college fund for Marti. He also got an email from Trollassor - the daily death threat from him - and one from Rusty, who was requesting Vlad's expertise in weblogs for K5. Vlad gladly assisted Rusty with what he needed, and replied to Trollassor's email with a on-line chuckle and a smile
Slashdot will become extinct if they keep posting this mindless dreck.
/.
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?
Almost forty years ago, I had to decide what to do with my life. Should I go into hardware or software? Well it seemed obvious to me that pretty soon all the useful software would be written and there would be no jobs for programmers; so I went into hardware. My little brother went into software. His house is at least three times as large as mine and twice as gorgeous. (At least I have a nicer wife and my dog is better behaved than his dog.) Boy, did I ever call it wrong! I also thought we would all be working ten hour weeks because of automation.
As long as the hardware keeps up at its Moore's law rate, we will keep being able to do new and better things and will therefore still need programmers.
You do realize that historically it is normal for around 35-40% of the non-institutionalized working age (ie not imprisoned or commited) population not be employed?
t xt
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.
Ain't gonna happen. Even as the tools get better and more "user friendly" [hah!] we get more of them and they're more complicated. It still requires a coder's mindset to work through those kinds of problems.
I'm somewhat amused that on the java.net home page there's an article about the proliferation of Java component libraries. What the headline doesn't say is that they all have their own learning curve, their own peccadillos, and their own unique characteristics.
I agree with the parent that woefully few of us bother to research our algorithms and optimize our code anymore. So what? The tools make it unnecessary, and CPU speed has so outpaced software that it's usually counterproductive to try to improve code beyond what a good optimizing compiler can do. Yet on the other hand, I can write a full-blown Windows app with all the bells and whistles in a couple of weeks. (Which is exactly what I've been doing lately.)
I'm an old programmer. I've been at it for almost thirty years now. I'm about as senior as it gets in my field (healthcare.) The things I work on today aren't that much different than what I worked on back in 1977. PCs instead of mainframes, optimizing compilers instead of line-based interpreters, but it's still just as much of a struggle translating what the user wants into a working program. And I'm confident that will still be true when I'm hacking the database at the old-age home to make it give me more pudding with my lunch.
Many of my peers who are graduating with CS degrees all think they are going to be rich some day, yet when I look at what they know and what they have done, their degree is just about as good as any other. They've learned a bunch of theories and programmed in one-answer environments where they are provided the methods to solve the problem and the solution at the end.
Why are programmers a dying breed? Because the QUALITY of programmers have dropped. People often jump into the CS major purely because of the hype and money. Many people try to become programmers with little to no experience and/or talent. As I recently found out when conducting my own interviews for programmers, candidates looked good on paper, but quickly revealed a lack of true proficiency in the skills they are supposed to be experts on.
When I am getting sample code that is riddled with inefficiency or obvious security holes, there's no way I can hire the candidate. When "expert" C++ programmers are sending me samples of their CS homework, I can only wonder how much the term "expert" has been degraded.
My boss summed up the process of finding a good programmer best when he said, "get's annoying doesn't it?" Sure the hell is.
are all good examples of why programmers are not going away anytime soon. I've been hearing this nonsense for over 20 years now. Yes, bad programmers will become extinct, but so be it. Good programmers will always be able to have a comfortable existance.
The basic fallacy is that a programmer is similar to a blacksmith. He isn't. A blacksmith is the equivalent of a code-monkey: he takes a known design for an object and does the grunt work of making a physical object. He's the human equivalent of a CNC machine center. He got replaced when we could build machines that could do the actual physical work faster and cheaper than he could.
But who first came up with the designs for the parts that get built? That's the heart of programming: taking a task to be done and figuring out how to get a computer to do it. We don't need blacksmiths to forge tools anymore, but we do need metallurgists and mechanical engineers and the like to create the designs for tools we need that didn't exist before.
All those "codeless development environments" suffer from one flaw: they can't do anything that hasn't already been done. If I need a pie chart drawn and the environment doesn't have a component to draw pie charts, I can't create a pie chart until I step outside the environment and create such a component and put it into the environment. I'm not worried about my job as a programmer going away as long as people keep coming up with new things they'd like to do that nobody's done before.
Maybe it's a matter of perspective. Max's article has a lot of examples from the user's perspective, and almost none from the side of the servers actually doing the work that the user sees. As a sanity check, I recommend reading "His Share of Glory", the collected short stories of C.M. Kornbluth.
It's not the language, it's the data!
Prgramming is easy. Most smart users can pick up the basics in no time. The fundamentals have not changed in decades.
The real challenge is manipulating data structures.
- From forms into data structures
- From data strutures into reports that humans can read.
It makes sense to store data structurally.
Users just dont have the patience for fan traps, many to manys, ERDs etc..
That's where programmers play
I'm waiting will computer can figure out how to do forms -> data structure -> reports all by itself with no help.
At least in way.. an above post mentions how important metal fabrication is and the number of workers in this industry. Blacksmiths primarily made weapons that are now outdated by well over a century. Sure they made things other than swords and such, but that was what drove the trade. Software on the other hand is more essential to modern weapons than ever. So I don't see how programmers could go the way of the Blacksmith. Beyond that, Of course, software also goes way beyond the weapons trade. So the comparison is a little off-base.
I can't imagine a future where software won't play a critical role. Hardware will just become faster and cheaper and allow for more and more advanced software.
I think the real reason why coding is such an ill-respected trade is due to a lack of understanding on the part of those in power (both in the government and major corporations).
Regardless of how smart or easy the programming language is, you will always need smart, subject matter experts, ie. business analysts, to determine the functional programming logic.
- Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral
Here is auther argument why programmers will mostly extinct:
# he advent of the Codeless Development (Sun Java(TM) Studio Creator etc) Well thouse tools will not work without the human. Call it "codeless" but it is still the human who manufacture end product. I don't see any reason why he shoudn't be called programmer.
# The emergence of the software factory (Microsoft) And who works on those factories ?
# Fewer students enrolled in computer science courses SO there was some overproduction of programmers during high-tech bubble. So what ? Engineers are hardly extinct after the Great Depression.
Genetic algorithm, genetic programming To work with genetic algorithms is a lot of fun. They really produce some non-trivial solutions sometime. But for now it's more area for scientific research the for industrial application. And the genetic programming is an oreder of magnitude more difficalt then other genetic algorithm. It will take dozens of years before GA/GP will make noticable competition to human programmer.
Yeah, that ain't no troll. It's true. You Java morons just can't accept it. You'll be out of jobs soon anyway.
Morons.
1. Article is a bit wordy. If the author's Java code is as wordy as that article, then no wonder he sees code generators replacing him. The trick is factoring repetition so that you don't need code generators. If Java is not dynamic enough to factor, then use Python or Lisp or the like.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
I read the last article (what I could stand of it)
and it's clear that the person who wrote it has an agenda but far less than a column of facts and figures to back it up. I realize a lot of you can't find the opportunities that were in the job market before the bubble burst. GET OVER IT. There are plenty of people in manufacturing, farming, and Lord knows what else who have experienced this. The successful ones don't stoop to the level of self-pity and vindictiveness that Slashdot "my brain so much bigga than yours" readers have. The bottom line is that you can keep your skills up and keep putting out resumes, you can spend all your time whining about your situation on Slashdot and hoping that some politician will magically make everything better, or you can find another line of work. This situation is commonly referred to as life, and it has less to do with the unemployment rate this month than you might think.
He's right; the demise of the programmer is inevitable--only the timeframe in which this will happen is debatable.
The whole momentum of computer science is a shift towards abstraction and automation. As we build structures that reach higher and higher, we know less and less about the plumbing inside--necessarily. Eventually we'll write that program that has enough insight about its own inner workings that it sits and thinks and then goes and recompiles a better version of itself; we'll have created our own form of highly exaggerated evolution. The system will evolve much quicker than any biological one ever could.
For such a system, the "experts" that interact with it will need to know how to ask it the right questions, not how to optimize the C code that makes up its search algorithm.
It's kind of tragic that computer scientists all ultimately share the goal--creating the machine that makes their jobs obsolete. But it's also very noble.
First, there's yesterday's article about USA today proclaiming the extinction of the American Programmer within the next few years.
Now this tripe about how programming is doomed.
All I know is that my rates have been back up into triple digits per hour for a year now, and not only do I have more work than I can handle, but I'm turning away work.
It ain't 2002 anymore, thank goodness.
Hmmm. Maybe it's because people are getting spooked by these articles, and continue leaving the field.
I think I'll continue living, learning and having fun applying my knowledge to things I love to do. It seems like a pretty good gig to me.
Blacksmithery grew into multiple jobs just because so many more materials are of use in making things nowadays. I think you could alsmot say any Mechanical Engineer is really the descentant of a blacksmith.
Software development may change, but it still will be around for a long time. I don't even think it will really change that much for a while because the whole industry is in a cyclical churn that seems to be just rehashing older stuff.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat12.tx t
According to the government's own statistics the full time employment count is over 112 million people and the part time employment is at 23 million leading us to 135 million plus or minus.
Not nearly the 50% you scream. Your anti-business, anti-capitalist screed is obviously not backed up by any facts and instead is just emotional driven with attempts to brand all businesses as the root of societies problems.
The most common businesses portrayed as cause are large corporations who DO NOT employ the majority of the people working in this country.
There are more people working in this country than at any other time in our history. October numbers , which the ones I posted are not, pushed the total employment numbers to 139.5M
I work for one of the fortune 100 and we are so swamped with work in our IT departments that we have had to expand our people. Sarbane's Oxley introduced who new levels of data retention and accuracy all of which takes coding. Most systems used by business cannot use off the shelf generic software.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Not anywhere soon that is.
:)
That kind of talk, was beginning when I started studing computers in the 90's.
The saying was, as it was "the thing" everyone was going to study, in 10 years we would achieve saturation of the market.
I wasnt afraid then, because i always thought the good ones will always get jobs. (and im not so humble)
The thing is, the market saturated, and for the first time in history, computer people have to actually look for a job, instead of choosing a job (that was the scenario when i finally graduated in computer science engineering. Companys would pay higher and higher just to get one guy. jumping from job to job you could double the pay in one year)
Am I afraid? Still not. Why?
Because computers are the way to go. There will be always need to have programers. At least untill we reach the idilic society where everything is done automatically. Until the day I "think" of getting a strawberry filled cookie and one automagically appears in front of me, there will always be work for programmers.
There are still hundrets of unsolved problems, and all the solved ones can always be improved. Thats why I think extinction is not anytime soon.
The trend is to have more and more programmers. As with everything, not all of them will get an easy job like in the nineties. But thats the way all the other jobs worked until now. Whatever other thing you study, you need to find your place in the market, be it medicine, art, or (yuk) law school(*).
Programmers will be rendered useless after we reach "REAL" AI. At that time, any AI computer will be able to program better than us, and reprogram itself to be better and better at it exponentially (and faster). But then again, it will be able to do just about anything better than us, so its not only programmers than have to worry.
Ideally, when we reach that stage, we will be smart enough to let it do all the work for everyone and live in an utopial system. Not sure the institutionalized powers will allow that though.
(*) law school teaches us that there is another way to keep a "class" from extinction. We have far more lawyers than should be needed, but lawyers themselves create the market for their jobs passing more and more stupid laws so they keep having their jobs despite more people coming from law school.
I hope we dont go that way, but it would be easy to keep our jobs... just place some nasty time trigered bug bombs in the code and "voila"
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
..."self writing programs in the armchair IT publication "PC World". I think it was the July or August edition. It was about this company that is writing the "next generation" of development tools. They suggest that in the near future everyone will be a programmer because this new approach basically lets anyone build their own applications by pointing and clicking and writing basic text descriptions of what they want the application to do. Then this development environment sets out to building the application to their specs.
That's a very good section to quote. Programmers will be around for a long time because no matter how easy you make those tools to use, buisness people do NOT want to use them. They want someone else to press those buttons and enter the etxt descriptions.
And the reason for that is that without "programmers" you cannot make those systems really do what you want. Programmers (as ever) provide the glue to mesh fantasy with reality in such a way that the business fantasy can have some degree of substantiality to it. If you let a business guy sit in a room for a year with a compyuter, he might come out with a whole lot of excel macros but if you want something that's going to run day in and day out to keep a business going you ar egoing to haev to get a "programmer" to tie it together.
Not to mention that the people developing these tools are also programmers - so they tool they end up developing just continues the mindset embodied by the programmer. Very few development tools are really able to reach very far outside that box, and the amount of work to reate something that operates in a way alien to prorgammers is huge because you are fighting the very creators each step of the way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
What we are seeing is quite different. Applications programming is becoming more of an off-the-shelf business with minor local customization. This is the business of PeopleSoft, SAP, and the rest of that crowd. There's been a big dent in the COBOL/Java crowd, but there's about as much serious programming as a decade ago.
For those in San Francisco, note that Edward Klockars, Blacksmith, still has his little wooden shop on Folsom near 1st. Even though there is now a skyscraper next door and two more going up across the street.
First of all, your argument comparing programmers to blacksmiths is already a counter-proof for what you are saying.
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.
Writing software is hideously complicated.
The skills required to successfully design and impliment software remain light-years beyond quantification - unlike the skills required to build a cart wheel or hammer, or, for that matter, a car body or a silicon wafer.
The concept of a "software" factory, building generic components, is more or less exactly that originally touted by OO back in the 80s.
This approach failed because large components have not been made (people tend to make "stack" and "list", not "user interface" and "VPN") and because of the huge front-loaded cost of making such components general-purpose rather than one-shot.
--
Toby
Maybe in a place where everyone uses Windows or Mac it gets too difficult to understand how computer really work...
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
- programmers are engineers.
-
engineers solve problems.
-
there always have been problems
-
there always will be problems
thanks to 1,2 and 3, every society more complicated than hunter-gatherer has had an engineering role, whatever they called it. Assuming we have a future at all, 4 means we will continue to need engineers. So I gotta see if this art. is one of those pipe dreams about low level coding going away because, comes the revoluttion, your spoken wish turns into requirements, specifications, identificaiton of applicable standards and components, ERD+UML and a little black MDA box poops out your software.even wishes need engineering
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
But, now they are called machinist. Believe it or not the majority of run run and prototype parts for new designs are not not done by big companies, but are farmed out to small one or two man operations.
I have a friend who owns his own machine shop. He works alone (for himself) and makes a decent living.
The "big corps will rule the world" death cry is flawed in that the bigger a corporation is, the harder it is for it to adapt to changing technologies or tends.
-- TMK
I wonder if once nerds lose their jobs and therefore their money, they will return to the bottom of the social pyramid again.
Really, that is a necessary step. Making programming programs that can make anything useful is a long way off, and programming programs that can make things better than humans is even farther off. Even longer into the future are programming programs that make programming programs. All of these must be superior to what humans do. Programmers may go the way of the blacksmith, but look how long blacksmiths were around for.
Not a sentence!
A joke to illustrate:
There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for more than 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later, the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion-dollar machines.
They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, "This is where your problem is."
The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They (bookkeepers!) demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.
The engineer responded: "One chalk mark: $1; knowing where to put it: $49,999."
It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
So somehow this stuff is going to start writing itself? I don't think so.
The software components idea is like building a machine out of stock parts rather than designing every little bit yourself. That's great but it still doesn't make up for the vastly increasing complexity of software. If you count parts and inter-relationships, you've still got more complexity that needs to be engineered.
OK, so yes, some narrow classes of software like certain office apps can be designed and built in more and more automated ways, but this also doesn't make up for the explosion of what computers and software can do.
Just because people don't readily see code, they seem to think it can be magically woven in ways that engineered physical objects like ships and planes and cars obviously cannot. They also think that code is code is code, which is like saying a machine that designs and builds toasters automatically can also design and build ships.
Sorry, code is like matter and components are like parts and you still need engineers to put the crap together.
Why am I not surprised? Codeless Development Environments? Is it the 80s again? Good grief.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
. ...Roboticist. (Or something.)
My grandfather came off the farm in the 30's on the plains of Saskatchewan to work in a blacksmith shop, which turned into a car garage that very decade.
The first 10 generations of semi-sentient robots are going to take a lot of skilled people to direct their efforts, I look forward to a never ending set of technical careers. Yes, perhaps I won't be shoeing horses all my life, but I'm not worried none the less. It's not like the need for blacksmiths is going to go away in a flick of the wrist nor present a natural opportunity for me to move on.
For now, I'm comfortable and happy. And I don't expect to have to *PPANNNICCCC* (OMG FFS HAX0RZ!! LAMER!) at any time in my life.
Props to anyone who is facing a wall at the moment, I didn't say it would be *pleasant* figuring out where else to go or what to do. But at least this isn't 700 years ago, you won't just up and starve.
Isn't it kind of lame for an author to quote themself from another work they did. This dude quotes his other book to define "fitscape" (in itself a thoroughly artificial word). Why not just put a definition in it rather than source out to his other work. It makes sense if it was some other author or some other word, but it just seems a little ego-stroking (or "fitsturbation" as it is known).
I'm begging someone to take away this blow-hard's keyboard.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Well since his article points out that it took about 5000 years (from 3300 BC to 1900) for blacksmiths to go extict, I figure programmers still have about 4900 years left to go.
the american programmers can all just write open source software, they wouldn't be paid for that anyway.
For him it did. He is part of the ever growing business tactic of "declining and falling" the US programmer. He outsourced most of his development work for his company to bangalore, injuh quite a long time ago.
As long as companies get tax breaks to outsource, whether it's a blue collar widget or one of ya'alls "widgets", they will do it. As long as people refuse to notice that their cost of living doesn't go away and the cost of trinkets they "save" on doesn't equate or surpass those still standard costs, you will see it get *suckier*. it is the most basic of economics, absuredly simple to see. People have refused, they clung desparately to their delusions that they would 1.2.3 PROFIT, that they missed the forest for the trees it appears. That's reality, people traded the globalists magic beans of new cheap shiny trinkets for the decent work and still affordable US made stuff cow, because they got sold the "greed thing",it got dangled out and they took the bait, bit dowen hard, ran with it the economy is "reeling" with the sing of outflowing jobs and cash. but, this is called a 'strong economy dag nabbit!"
Ha! About the most successful human congame ever invented. It never fails, offer people a lot of something for apparently nothing, they will swap. The trick is to convince them that what they have is worthless, in this case, a huge range of middle class still useful jobs, millions of them. That was the swap dangled out, cheaper goods at the stores in exchange for giving up your job and learning something new or..whatever, that part they left out too. Poly tickshunbs are always big on the 'I will create new jobs!', but when you hold them down they got no answers other than saying those words over and over again.
You can't have it both ways, either buy US in all your business dealings, your day to day life, or suck it up and suffer when your job goes buh bye. Be content to have high cost of living in exchange for cheaper consumer goods. You are on your own if you have no money though, then it becomes tough luck, too bad.
Oh? It's too late for that, you can't buy US and keep the loot recirculating internally where it magnifies over and over again building middle class society? You say most everything is built overseas now?
Ya, I noticed that stuff, noticed it 25 years ago and wrote and warned against it then. Told white collars they would be next, about zee-ro believed it because they are "too special" and "no one" can do what they do and etc, etc. Why, stock trading would replace work! I heard that, too, a lot. americans were going to be the worlds managers, white collar only, all the jobs secure..because of.....they never explained that part. or they mumble the magic word "capitalism" like saying that over and over will somehow do the trick. And with computers, all we need are bits and bytes, nothing tangible is needed for existence! It's worth billions, and you can just type up reality!
For some reason, according to them folks, what I was told, billions of people all over the planet were just going to shuffle around and go "yass massah" and do our bidding, no one would need to work beyond "management" or maybe "sales". IT was just gonna be the new interest, sort of a national hobby we could do on the side to get even richer, because it was all going to be from "investing" somehow, back to "stocks". You see, no one needs to work, just them "other folks" who live way over yonder someplace, they are supposed to be doing all the work, and you just get a check, a BIG one!
That was the theory
It has been embarassing to me to watch it happen.
humph, but hey,cheer up! You can always stop by walmart and pick up some cheap trinkets with your... oh ya, no check..sorry dude....well the government has some plans to "help you out" of your dilemma as you re-retrain for the future! sorry about that college degree, here, try this method.........
Now, step into this nice room here and we'll show you.....
"MOM, what's for DINNER!1?!"
"Here kids, have a nice bowl of nutritious soylent green stew, with some nice recycled cardboard bread and sludge butter"
"YAAAAAA!"
Anyone remember "The Last One," which was supposed to make all programmers obsolete?
:-)
You don't? Wonder why?
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheLastOne
-Urocyon
(Too lazy to create an account.)
There's a better model than blacksmiths: musicians.
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.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Blacksmiths have not been replaced by machines. They are the ones using the machines, and they aren't called blacksmiths anymore. Lathes and jigsaws and welding torches, etc. don't just work by themselves, you know.
Indeed. Blacksmiths still had plenty of viable alternatives with some training:
* Jeweler
* Car repair
* Factory machine repair
* Welders
* Business-machine repair (copiers, pre-computer-sorters, etc.)
* Tractor operator
* Tractor reparer
* Machine operator
But what seems to be missing with programmers is similar alternatives. I have not seen very many suggestions that are immune from offshoring or don't require gobs more people skills. That is what is different between us and smithys. Offshoring is not creating signifant similar alternatives that past changes have. And, that is the scary part. Unless some Next Big Thing comes along that favors geeks, we are doomed.
Table-ized A.I.
Alarmist Bull Puckey. About half of the "working age" population are women, so subtract the stay-at-home moms and the working moms who choose to be home when the kids get home from school, and the picture looks a little less severe. Then subtract the maternity leave population. Then subtract the full and part-time students who work part time out of necessity. Then subtract the early retirees. Then subtract the seasonal workers who hunker down off-season. Then subtract the already known floating population of the temporarily unemployed. Then subtract the self employed small business people. Get the picture?
Your world where 100% of the working age population must slave away at a full time day job to keep the economy going exists only in the propaganda of liberal left wing social engineers.
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...
mt
My job today as software developer is very different than 25 years ago when I started. And thank god for it, since I am far more productive. I regret not a bit the loss of punch cards and assembler. Yet I am still in the profession of instructing computers how to do things.
Perhaps a better article would have been about what the programmer's job of the future will look like. And a really good article would drop that idiotic phrase "post-modernism".
The Next Big Thing is more than a decade away, though. In the meantime wealth will continue to concentrate at the top, and the increasing numbers at the bottom will get enough scraps to live on to keep them from revolting and REDISTRIBUTING the wealth more fairly.
We're facing a future where increased productivity gains (hoarded by the wealth) mean that vastly more people will be technologically unemployed, but are still expected to WORK to justify their existence. Frankly, I'm resigned to the fact that the situtation can only get worse, until the molecular nanotech is developed that allows people to live self-sufficiently, independent of most traditional trade-based economies.
--
Power to the Peaceful
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/16/1 657249
'Nuff said
I didn't see him state that 'code is dead' any more than 'iron is dead'. He did mention some things that limit the size of the niche for the programmer in the future. It's a process we're already feeling: When was the last time someone said "Become a programmer, and you'll always have a job" and you believed it? About just before the dot-com crash I'll wager - longer ago the longer you saw that crash coming. Since then, at least here in Denmark, programmers have been something you insulate walls with, they are so cheap. Developers, computer scientists, now! That's still good for a job - much like an engineer or architect still is.
Why nis that? Because the programmer, who started existence as the weird guy who could grok punch cards and make computers actually do stuff has made computers capable of doing stuff under the command of others. The CDE and code factory are merely extensions of this. C is a higher level language than assembler is. Thus it is easier to use and can handle larger systems - however some things need assembly instructions written by hand to work. The same goes all the way to the top: Most code that PHB #324 needs will either already have been written, or can be written by someone using a high-level development tool, such as a CDE. This is to a degree the world today - or at least tomorrow. In fact, this is the point of higher-level programming tools and languages. It is the point of using ready-made libraries instead of building from the ground up.
As to your calling fewer programming jobs non sequitur, I wonder. Because that is in fact the whole of the point: There are fewer blacksmith jobs today than 100 years ago. Similarly, the programmer as seen today will suffer a decline in job openings, just as did the 1960-style punch-card programmer. At some point, code smiths will be as rare as iron smiths - and that's what the entire article series is all about.
I knew I should have studied accounting...
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.
IANAL... But I play one on
are not the ones capitalizing some way some how? these programmers and execs overseas are reaching the pinnacles of their careeres while the unemployed here wallow in their dispair.
ummm, who will write softare then? Machines? Those machines will still need to be programmed and parameters needing adjusting. Maybe there will just be more subspecies of programmer and these will eventualy take over. I guess eventualy we will die out, but not in our life times.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
If you are, your grasp of the complexity of the latter is a joke.
to say bookeeping has advanced/evolved to accountant, CPA, auditor, banker, financial advisor, finance professor, .... while saying blacksmithing has dies is so totally incorrect and unfair.
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.....
30 years ago, a large percentage of the programmers out there were writing what was basically spreadsheet code. Some manager needed some information, and that meant a programmer had to write a program to read data, generate reports, and add them to the daily jobs. Then came spreadsheets, and the manager could do that work instead. The programmer was out of a job...
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...
Chances are if you're a blacksmith in this day and age, you're actually in pretty high demand. My father-in-law does it as a side "hobby". Sells some of his stuff a local craft shows, demonstrates at schools...he's really good, and people are willing to pay decently to get him to make them stuff.
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.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
"domiciled in the U.S."? How about "living"? This is either a parody with an isufficiently inviting intro or the pointless ramblings of a blowhard who could use an English lesson.
The author seems to think that smithy means the same thing as smith or blacksmith. A smithy is a smith's workplace.
Yeah, ever since the Dark Wanderer of Tristram turned Griswold into a wretched zombie, the whole blacksmithing profession's gone to shit. Frankly, I'm suprised Deckard Cain didn't outsource killing Baal to a bunch of Pakistani adventurers and used all the gold he'd save to buy a spank-ass new Pimp Cane, um, I mean "Horadric Staff."
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
Some of the IT VPs where I work are not even happy that some of the Windows codebase is written overseas. Any computer I need to take out to a classified site has to be scanned and checked, and any non-standard software has to be investigated for overseas code. Yes, they have called companies and talked to the project managers there about the where all their source code came from.
--- Ban humanity.
...but I can't get decent software developers anywhere. The're becoming harder to find alright, but it's not because companies are offshoring, or replacing them with code generation tools, or whatever this whack-job's theory is....it's because too many people were pulled into the industry because of the glitz and glamour (i.e. Money) of the dot-com era, and even the 2002-2003 recession wasn't enough to push them all out. Now we have a situation where idiots employ idiots because they don't know any better.
Good developers will be able to find good jobs for the forseeable future (10 years minimum). The need for them is not going away. And it won't until you can sit a computer down with a domain expert and turn english prose into executable code.
After meandering through a comparison of blacksmiths and bookkeepers, the author concludes that programmers will be replaced by AI. Nerds will be obsolete and touchy-feely types will rule the day. I think this prediction has been made twice a week since Admiral Hopper was picking insects out of her computer.
Here's my prediction: doom-predicting authors will be replaced by a Perl script called Mix'n'Meme, a boutique doom predictor. Whenever you need a pomo prediction, you just run Mix'n'Meme and it randomly scrapes a 19th century poem off the net and bases a half-plausible prediction thereon.
However I predict that Mix'n'Meme will use words correctly. For example, the word enjoin, which the author seems to like greatly, means to instruct or direct. I'm not sure what the author thinks it means.
Ok this guy is either on some serious brain crippling medication or just plain brain dead. Either was he is full of shit. An analogy with the blacksmith? Oh for his consideratio as far as I know we are still using steal and a great deal of it and steal/iron/any metal is still pretty much produced the same way it was done 1000 years ago. Only change is that now we emply machines along side people and that speads the process a great deal and also allows us to produce a lot more and better quality metals. Now if you look on the computer side of things what exactly is going to replace the human brain in a compleatelly creative job which is coding? Unless he has seen any indication that AI development is on the verge of a breakthrough (which I personally doubt) I don't see how else is a programmer going to be replaced. The only thing that is happening is that with crappy languages you can now write half-ass programs a lot faster than before and that saves you time. However, there is a growing demand for new technological devices and therefore growing demand for new code written so the need for programmers ends up at about the same place that it started.
... well actually on a second though I do believe that a java supporter is absolutelly capable of doing something like this.
So my friend I would suggest to do some research and data analysis and probably think a little bit more logical about the stuff that you write. I can't believe those articles actually got published
It is true that jobs in the US are going down in numbers but that does not mean that globaly they are.
The point of the article is not that programming will die, but that the profession of "programmer" will. The question is open to debate, but I do find people's unwillingness to even enterain the notion somewhat disconcerting.
Is it really difficult to believe that at some point in time most programming will simply not require highly-trained individuals? It might not take place in our lifetime, and I agree wholeheartedly that the masses of less-educated programmers still need help, but the nature of what we call "programming" could change radically and with it the workplace for programmers could change as well.
What if biotechnologists became the new leaders of the technology revolution? What if advances beyond binary computing totally disrupted the nature of computing itself?
I just can't help but feel that we're willfully ignoring this potential, because for the last 50 years programmers have been on an upward path in terms of pay, relevance, and prestige. Nothing lasts forever.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
For a minute there I thought I understood the decline in programmer productivity.
Images of Bangalore and Delhi after an Old Smoky is delivered by the Pakis.
Headlines: "IT Smithies Pay Increases 10-fold!"
Only the smell of a rotting dead programmer could have induced this color scheme.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Seems that once a decade a group of slugs crawl out from under their rocks to proclaim that programmers will be obsolete Real Soon Now. Each time, within 6 to 18 months the demand for programmers outstripped the supply. I witnessed this in 1977, 1985, and 1997. Each time these morons disappeared into some obscure think tank or asylum (is there a difference?).
The author posits that blacksmithing has died out, while bookkeeping has continued, because the knowledgebase that the blacksmith needed was ripe for scientific analysis and automation, while the bookkeeper has to deal with constantly changing requirements. Therefore, since bookkeepers have to always change/upgrade/modify/tweak their craft, they aren't as likely to be automated.
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
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
One mind, one collective idiology, one unity. All for the hive, at the expense of the individual.
Thanks God the BORG is just in science fiction.
>Vote for Nader only if you want four more years of Bush.
Correct!
Only to explain the Guerilla Marketing from the subject: "WIR sind das Volk"
Was the slogan from us Eastern Germans used to sweep out the regime. Means something like "We are the people" (implying, you have lost all our legitimacy - all legitimacy comes from and belongs to us - we are now taking it in our hands").
Hopefully you in the US will follow our example and make the world a better place.
Heh, at first I thought, this guy is retarded.
But now I know why he posted this crap.
This was the rough copy for some articles he was writing, and needed us to proof read it for him.
It's probably for some high school assignment or something.
Thats the only explanation for the incorrect use of 'big words'.
But look at all the good critiques we give!
You're welcome buddy. Hope you do well on your grade 10 assignment.
The only real Langauge still in existace today that is not some library bloated, scripting language is Assembler.. nothing else comes close.
the stunning thing is that Nader persists in campaigning in the light of this obvious fact. he's being helped by Republicans, and another four years of Dubya will pretty much undo Nader's entire life's work.
sadly, Nader is likely to go down in history as a fool, especially if he turns out to be instrumental again. a visionary fool, yes, but a fool nonetheless.
Welcome to Slashdot!
Here's your sign!
If you apply genetic programming to software and hardware development then we may see the software and hardware breeder. This will be necessary due to genetic load ( you don't want to run microsoft runt office). Breeding or artificial selection is probably the most power full technology we know of and yet so simple. So I will have a software stud and you can purchase my germplasm to introduce to your stock of office productivity software that you are breeding. This will become necessary to cope with the "emergent properties" of the the complexity that we will have to face. In other words we don't know what will happen we we start yanking on those wires. So we will have to breed purely on the phenotype of the software who cares what language its written in
Thank you for the rigorous response; I appreciate a debating with someone who has more than the usual vacuous replies one usually encounters here.
Would you claim that it is impossible to use any of Knuth's work without attending a single college class? If so, which class?
I would aregue the education system in America (and possibly other countries) does not exist to educate the masses; their goal is to make money---they are a business, after all. As such, their function is to sell product (degrees) or research in exchange for grants and prestige.
A degree does not indicate or preclude learning of any sort; only that the possessor "attended" some classes, wrote a thesis or dissertation (quality notwithstanding) and supposedly passed some oral/written tests.
That is an assumption, and it is incorrect. My own ability to excel in coding was not obtained in college, as a) I was programming professionally prior to attending college, b) the coding classes I did take (undergraduate "breadth") were irrelevant to what I do professionally; we learned no such magic techniques. All the understanding I gained came from self-study of Knuth, McConnell, and from various and sundry mentors, well after I earned my degree.
I agree and would add there is an "art" component that is equally important.
Yeah, right.
If the premise is that a programmer is a person who types syntax into a compiler then yes, the programmer may be on the verge of extinction. But if one looks at the fundamental difference between a programmer and a user, that the programmer is a professional problem solver and system analyst (the concept not the made up job title) while a user simply uses the tools that programmers construct, the programmer will always exist. As a programmer in the financial services field I have come to realise that there is a huge difference between the way that I view problems and the way that other employees view the same problems. I apply a common set of analytical tools and skills to any problem that I am put to task on in a way that users cannot as they are unable to make the leap from the specific to the abstract. That is the basis of programming as a profession and I don't see it changing for a long time, no matter what form of ingenious new language is devised (strangely enough by programmers..)
I think Tcl/Tk is a far better cross-platform solution than Java or Python. I'm not knocking any of them, I just think a complex program in Tcl/Tk which has to interface to C is much easier than trying to call ANSI C from Java or Python or anything else. And it gives you all the essential advantages of Python and none of the heavy typing load of Java.
We're still safe! That program still needs a person to compile its child!
The cake is a pie
I finally went and RTFA, and I disagree that the blacksmith disappeared. The blacksmith became the machinist, and the machinist population is slowly decreasing, but is unlikely to go away.
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/manufacturing engineers, but the function will be much the same-- turn hunks of metal into useful stuff for people. They just do it in a higher tech environment.
The more blacksmith-like machinist is the toolmaker. These people are ever fewer in number, but are likely to never disappear entirely. Just like there is a small but steady need for technical glassblowers (to supply chemists) there will be a need for toolmakers/precision machinists in the foreseeable future.
Programming could be seen in a similar way-- the tools are improving drastically-- my dad started with toggle switches to set the bits, then moved to punch cards. By the time I was programming, the punchcard was all but dead, the microcomputer had just come on scene, and the mainframe was about to become a brontosaurus. Things were done with a command line. Now there are fancy IDEs for all sorts of languages, graphical languages and development tools, automated code generators, etc. It's still programming, just with different tools. The need for codemonkeys may decline, but it probably won't go away. There will be a market for them just like there still is for analog electrical engineers in the digital age. There won't be a need for people to hand produce boring code, but there will be clever things that need to be coded by hand, and probably lots of them.
Maybe you guys didn't catch this sure-fire sign of overly-academic writing (sometimes also found outside academia, alas):
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....
Bookkeepers also do custom work - but what stops those needs from becoming standardized? Why don't businesses deliberately organize their affairs, so they fit within an exact model of a business, so that accountancy does become standardized? I think the reason is because different organizations of a business is often a competitive advantage - they don't want to standardize it; and if they did, straight off someone else would come up with a better organization and put them out of business.
Nothing here, move along.
emt 377 emt 4
I've once talked to one guy who, being fed up with IT, leaved his programmer job and became a blacksmith. Not just blacksmith, but one who does horseshoing. Though soon after that he was hired again to work on a program that examines pictures of horse hoofs to detect various diseases...
So if I understand the gist of this, the idea is that programmers will be replaced because the computers/software we make can program themselves as well as we can. Insofar as all the fun things to think about, genetic algorithms, neural nets, blah blah, you still need the programmer. If you don't, I say the following happens pretty quickly:
1. Computers do all the mental labor out there.
If they can do this how far is it until
2. They can do all the manual labor out there
And then of course from this you have
3. Computers replicate themselves.
Then it won't be just programmers who are obsoleted, programmers will have obsoleted the human race.
I'll wait until computers obsolete something as simple as crop picking before I get too scared.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
They don't have a "magical vibe". What they have is a mindset.
The people designing software in the end have to generate design docs the programmers understand and can implement. If the docs are a little hazy, a little unlcear (which they always are) then the programmer will develop an interface along the lines that he can understand it.
Furthermore, even if the docs are very clear if the programmer does not understand why the interface has been specified they way it is, there will be a LOT of little mistakes that lead to a mess because no spec is even complete, and the small holes that remain are filled in by the developer. This normally is painless but if you are trying to develop something where the developer has no understanding at all of why the final program is going to behave a certain way you are going to have to specify a lot more things than you normally do.
Furthermore all tools and libraries which programmers rely on are built on top of the same concepts programmers are used to.
I don't think you are understanding what my ultimate point was. It's that it is very, very hard to develop software that is not easiest to use by the people developing it. And that in turn means that very little software is going to bet built that is truly different, or built to mesh with the mind of a typical business guy who perhaps hates charting out complex relationship diagrams for a large set of business rules.
That's what I'm talkimg about. A buisness person has a need - say that gold level customers can order such and such a product and at such a discount, also they should be able to authorize certain partners to sell the same product for them. These same partners are "bronze" level customers normally who can only order one product and not customize it to the same extent.
Now ideally a business guy would be able to just throw all those requirements at some tool. They are pretty logical and well thought out. But the reality is a programmer has to go in and either tweak settings to get all those rules in place, or use the "easy" GUI that was built to be used by the business owner but in reality is too hard for them to understand - but developers get by because they know generally how it works when you use apps like that.
I know my original post sounded rather meta-physical, but it is instead quite real observations culled from years of using many tools and working with business people to get what they want done. I am saying the end is not nigh for developers, because the way to build the end is not yet well-defined.
The end state I'm talking about is where you have only business people and no developers. Perhaps you would care to state exactly what it would take to reach such a goal?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who wants to buy software anymore when one can download all the free software. The software industry is also killing itself with crappy software, expensive software and crappy user support.
The grandparent did not deny the existence of such tools. The problem of these tools is that they are very clumsy to deal with anything but the simplest cases. Drag-n-drop is just slower than typing, and you also have to arrange the placement of the boxes besides connecting them correctly. I have not used BizTalk, but I think my experience with Simulink and LabView qualifies me to say that such tools are mostly only useful for the highest level architecture, while lower-level logic are still better expressed in code currently.
Programming and software engineering are two totally different concepts. Programming is knowing the available technologies; software engineering is about the ability to combine these technologies in a way that is meaningful as an application. Programming indeed has become a commodity, and one can assemble a program quickly from off-the self parts (for example with Java). But software engineering will never become a commodity, because a computer application is always greater than the sum of its parts.
So gone are the days that knowing all the technical details was enough to get us a job. What we should invest in is software engineering, i.e. the knowledge and ability to design applications from small to large scale and from embedded to web. What pays today (and will pay in the foreseeable future) is the ability to hold a design in our heads from top level to the minutest detail, in order to be able to quickly create/adapt to new requirements in the most economical and profitable way. Technologies are just the medium, and the medium changes completely every 5 years. But the need to design things was there right from the start, and it will never go away.
Honestly, what is so bad about it?
/. talk like old USSR aparatchiks.
If you have the skills and are willing to cut in your expenses (most family don't need two cars, and they could get rid of the SUV, save energy bi better insulation, stopping eating so much rubish which is more expensive) you will have a job.
And if you don't then do something else. Life has always been like that, I don't understand why some people in
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In rich countries people normally don't starve to death, don't die of preventable diseases, live longer than in most other places and only have bad old years because they are too lazy to go out and do some exercise, stop smoking and eat sensibly.
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 countries) and adequatelly clothed, so frankly cut the bullshit man.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have heard this argument or something like about once every 6 months for the last 15 years.
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...]
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
"Pomo" is also the Finnish for "boss."
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
"and the increasing numbers at the bottom will get enough scraps to live on to keep them from revolting and REDISTRIBUTING the wealth more fairly."
Programmers of the world, unite!
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.
I'm not a coder, but I try to keep up with what's going on. Many replies have sited that libraries are now doing the heavy lifting based on the back breaking and artisan level skill of coders passed. Another reply stated roughly that coding drives chip design and chip design drives coding. This is the key why programmers, while not in great 90's style artificially and foolishly created demand will continue to exist. Intel has scrapped its P4 4Ghz plans and is shifting to the Pentium-M multicore theory. AMD has implemented its AMD64 strategy and Intel is following suit. A program will not take advantage of the full capacity of even the current-day AMD64 chips unless it is recoded to take advantage of those extra advantages - some of those will be realized through recompilation while the majority will be realized by going through the code again. It is stated in many places online that consumer desktop / business workstation applicatons / the predominant Windows operating system are not set up to give a rats arse about whether there is any SMP action going on. This coupled with the benefits of AMD's HyperTransport strategy and (gasp!) Intel's wanting to bring out FB-DIMMs will change how one optimizes an application or how they write it entirely. The programmer lives and will live for some time to come. And please, I've interacted with several thousand users in my lifetime and if they can figure out how to add two cells in Excel they're lucky.
Increased productivity is good for keeping business profits up, but it's no good at all for keeping people fed and clothed
BrainInAJar, you need to fish your brain out of that leftist Slashdot formula pickling brine, and use it to rethink this.
The difference between life in a modern economy with houses, cars, grocery stores, a closet full of clothes, and the ability to work with computers vs. the daily slog through the woods in your loincloth hoping to find berries to pick and gristly little wild animals to spear is PRODUCTIVITY. And for centuries the primary driver of productivity has been the advancing trade, division of labor, financing options, and relentless diversification of business.
Instead of a day's worth of food costing you a day of labor, it now probably costs you less than an hour, and a shirt, which once might have cost you several days of labor, now also tends to cost less than an hour. Yet you claim that productivity is no good at all for keeping people fed and clothed....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
"Programmers may be the first hit, but I doubt they will be the last."
ANYTHING which is knowledge-based, and which doesn't absolutely require an on-site physical presence, is off-shore-able.
It's ALREADY happening in financial services and in some law and medical services.
Most of the eventual victims -- including most slashdot readers --
are standing on a railroad track with a train coming down the track, and don't even realize it.
And NOTHING short of protectionism can save more than a small fraction of them, because there won't be enough jobs left worth having.
The remaining vocations worth having will have their compensation forced downward by on-shore competition.
And the few vocations which aren't ruined by that process, will be ruined when there are no longer sufficient potential on-shore customers who can afford their services.
Start getting used to the idea that the combined GNP of the world will be re-distributed to non-first-world countries, bringing most first-world inhabitants down toward their level.
It will *eventually* be corrected by the increasing modernization and productivity of the third-world, but not in time to help at least two generations of current workers who'll be impoverished.
The author is very obviously someone who doesn't write code for a living.
First, he mistakes cyclical adjustments of the economy for global changes. Has the number of CS students dropped lately? Probably. Have the number of IT jobs fallen? Probably. But I certainly don't consider this to be a trend that will continue down to zero. The type of programming we do will likely evolve over time with a high correlation to what is happening in the business world.
Second, he refers to writing HTML as if this is the pinnacle of what programmers do now. Personally, I spend my time writing software that streamlines and automates business processes for my employer. For the complexity of problems I solve, it will be long time before programs themselves become intelligent enough to create these types of solutions. The ability to take an abstract problem and create a concrete solution utilizing a software language, a web server, a database server, and any number of other "moving parts" requires a level of complexity that will not be present in AI anytime soon.
I think this guy is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
Sorry to burst everyones bubble but the simple answer is efficiency. Many programmers are less efficient in some area then programmers in another country (mainly monetary cost). So you have a few options either 1) Move to a low cost country or 2) Stay in your home country where companies consider you and your skills too expensive. It's this simple people, why do you think blacksmiths and a whole host of "blue collar" jobs have disappeared over time? It was inevitable it would happen to the "elite" and the "smart" I can't wait until they invent AI and robotics develops to a point where *everyone* is replacable, just think of the *class struggle* then, between human 1.0's and AI's that advance infinitely faster then the human race that created them.
...when I entered the field; CASE tools were all the rage then, remember CASE tools? No I didn't think so. Anyway, I was "warned" that programming would soon be replaced by these tools. It's now 2004; yes the industry has changed, but there are still programmers required, and there will be for a long, long time.
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!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Deckard Cain was a replicant. :)
I don't wanna think about his staff, especially since I had to build the damn thing for him since he lost all the pieces.
i am a soviet space shuttle
One of the article's central claims is that a "book-keeping factory" is impossible. On my home world we have entities called "accountancy firms" which are exactly that.
I am not saying computer users are stupid.
I am saying that computer developers tend to write programs that are easy for computer developers to use. And not everyone thinks like computer developers, or else there would be a lot more of them. Thus not everyone finds it easy to use said programs, and hires computer-development minded people to work them.
It turns out to be easier to hire people to use complex programs than to spend the effort writing versions that people with other mindses can use easily.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You REALLY dont understand what post modernist means do you?
They work everyday and make a pretty penny. Sure they aren't a requirement of modern society, but many people still need their services.
A lot of what a modern blacksmith does can be considered art. But historically they have always adorned their work with artistic touches.
I miss the art that people used to add to nearly everything they did even 60 years ago. Seems that after WWII there was no longer any time for decorative wood work in houses or beautifully built buildings, now everything is a plain box. Even cars are no longer beautiful, mearly boxes as well.
And for some strange reason your theory seems to please you?
From the view of someone that has been using computers since the "90 Column Card Daze", the nature of my job has changed alot. But this is also a case of, "The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same". The reason I'm still working with computers is that I will create working solutions on computers for people that don't want to do the job themselves. I make a fair living doing it.
But I do not agree with Max, for two fundamental reasons. One; as long as there are people with money that don't want to make computer solutions exist, I will always have a job. Second; and most damning, is that Computers are the Love Child of Mathmatics, as long as Mathmatics evolves, Computer solutions will do the same, I will then always have a job working on computers.
"And for some strange reason your theory seems to please you?"
Not at all. I'm not sure what makes you think so.
Maybe it's just because my description is so grim/bleak/stark, but that's merely a sincere reflection of my perceptions.
In fact I'm extremely unhappy about this prospect, and about the failure (IMO) of other people to see it coming, because nothing will improve the outlook until sufficient people come to the same conclusion.
With too many people inertia and denial prevail.
The problem with this analogy is that it's too simple. "Programming" spans a greater skill set than "blacksmith". A more accurate comparison would be not to "programmers" as a whole, but to "low level programmers" -- people doing tightly coded assembly, or even low level libraries and objects in C, C++ etc. Because these things are equivalent to the things smiths made -- commodity components like fasteners, gears, and even small machines like electric motors.
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!
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
no kidding, slashdot moderators are dumb
He uses the words 'smithy' and 'blacksmith' interchangeably, as in this sentence: "the vocation of "smithy" was then quite ubiquitous"... A smith or blacksmith is the guy who does the work, and the smithy is the place where he does it. Just to be thorough, I looked up 'smithy' in the dictionary, and found:
A blacksmith's shop; a forge. Also called smithery.
Not only does Mr. Goff abuse words, he misuses them too.