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Whatever Happened To Programming?
Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges." This 3-day-old article has sparked lively discussions at Reddit and at Hacker News, and the author has responded with a followup and summation.
It's not so much "dumbing down", but rather becoming a swamp navigator instead of an engineer. You can't just know principles, you have to also know the swamp.
More time is spent trying to figure out how to use and work around limitations of existing libraries and tools and less about designing such tools from scratch.
It can be roughly compared to what's going on in the automotive repair industry. You used to see all the parts involved and how they interact. Now a computer controls servos and if things don't work, you have to use Sherlock Holmes-like abilities to figure what's going on in the sealed dark-gray-box provided by Ford or Nissan that controls most of it. It's now about studying the relationship between the controller and the parts rather than "fixing the parts" directly.
It's a shift away from being The Wright Brothers toward being Sherlock Holmes: doing your best with limited clues by poking and prodding and digging instead of just making it "right". Instead of being a constructor, now we're deconstructors more or less.
Table-ized A.I.