The Programmer Identity Crisis

This comes up whenever _anything_ is automated: "this is the end of programming as a career!" I heard this about Rational Rose in the 90's, and Visual Basic in the 80's.

I don't think I'm sticking my head in the sand - an advanced enough intelligence could absolutely take over programming tasks - but I also think that such an intelligence would be able to take over _every_ thought-related task. And that may not be a bad thing! Although the nature of our economy would have to change quite a bit to accommodate it.

I might be wrong: Doug Hofstadter, who is way, way smarter than me, once predicted that no machine would ever beat a human at chess unless it was the type of machine that said "I'm bored of chess now, I would prefer to talk about poetry". Maybe coding can be distilled to a set of heuristics the way chess programs have (I don't think so, but maybe).

Whether we're right or wrong, there's not much we can do about it except continue to learn.

Visual Basic didn't exist in the 80's. First release was 1991.

Thanks for reminding me about Rational Rose though! That was a nostalgia trip

I can tell that nowadays in what concerns distributed systems built on top of SaaS enterprise products, using MACH architecture approach, my programming at work is quite minimal.

Most of my programming skills are kept up to date on side projects, thanfully I can managed the time to do them, between family and friends.

Man, these days I'm lucky if I get the century right.