The Programmer Identity Crisis

This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries. Programming has received a special treatment for the last few decades, and it's understandable that HN users would jump to protect their life investment, but it need not.

Hand-coding can continue, just like knitting co-exists with machine looms, but it need not ultimately maintain a grip on the software productive process.

It is better to come to terms with this reality sooner rather than later in my opinion.

> This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries.

It has also been responsible for predicting revolutions which never failed to materialize. 3D printing would make some kind of manufacturing obsolete, computers would make about half the world's jobs obsolete, etc etc.

Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

It's survivorship bias to only look at horses, cars, calculators, and whatever other real job market shifting technologies occurred in the past and assume that's how it always happens. You have to include all predictions which never panned out.

As human beings we just tend no to do that.

[EDIT: this being Pedantry News let me get ahead of an inevitable reply: 3D printing is used industrially, and it does have tremendous value. It enabled new ways of working, it grew the economy, and in some cases yes it even replaced processes which used to depend on injection molding. But by and large, the original predictions of "out with the old, in with the new" did not pan out. It was not the automobile to the horse and buggy. It was mostly additive, complementary, and turned out to have different use cases. That's the distinction.]

> Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

One could have made a reasonable remark in the past about how injection molding is dramatically faster than 3D printing (it applies material everywhere, all at once), scales better for large parts, et cetera. This isn't really true for what I'm calling hand-coding.

Obviously nothing about the future can be known for certain... but there are obvious trends that need not stop at software engineering.