Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the lost art of assembly.
Coding is just a means to an end. We’ve always searched for better and easier ways to convince the rocks to do something for us. LLMs will probably let us jump another abstraction level higher.
I too spent hours looking for the right PHP or Perl snippet in the early days to do something. My hard-earned bash-fu is mostly useless now. Am I sad about it? Nah. Writing bash always sucked, who am I kidding. Also, regex. I never learned it properly. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I’m glad these whatever machines are helping me do this grunt work.
There are sides of programming I like, and implementation isn’t one of them. Once upon a time I could care less about the binary streams ticking the CPU. Now I’m excited about the probable prospect of not having to think as much about “higher-level” code and jumping even higher.
To me, programming is more like science than art. Science doesn’t care how much profundity we find in the process. It moves on to the next thing for progress.