As the baseline of tooling gets raised, the baseline of expectation gets raised.
Programmers will use these tools the way we always have: To automate the simple work on the way to building a finished product that's more complex, and done more quickly, than would have been possible previously.
Some markets die, yes. It's no longer possible to make a business out of selling Unix clones for commodity hardware, like you still could in the 1980s. It's no longer possible to make a living just making static HTML websites, like you could in the 1990s.
Ultimately, what programmers trade in is a specific kind of problem-solving design sense. Not just solving this single problem as fast as we can, but creating a more general solution, which composes well and can be understood and changed later on. Once programs can do that... well, we'd better be willing to offer them citizenship and recognize their civil rights as thinking beings.
Comments
As the baseline of tooling gets raised, the baseline of expectation gets raised.
Programmers will use these tools the way we always have: To automate the simple work on the way to building a finished product that's more complex, and done more quickly, than would have been possible previously.
Some markets die, yes. It's no longer possible to make a business out of selling Unix clones for commodity hardware, like you still could in the 1980s. It's no longer possible to make a living just making static HTML websites, like you could in the 1990s.
Ultimately, what programmers trade in is a specific kind of problem-solving design sense. Not just solving this single problem as fast as we can, but creating a more general solution, which composes well and can be understood and changed later on. Once programs can do that... well, we'd better be willing to offer them citizenship and recognize their civil rights as thinking beings.