Will programmers become redundant? 8

[Ladyhawk]

-- The "Industry" thread with a better subject.

A friend of mine told me that he reckoned in 10 years time there won't be a need for programmers because there will be templates that any joe bloggs can use to create the application that they want.

Do other people think this?

Ladyhawk.
** ASP/VB/Java Programmer **

 

[CajunCenturion]

It all depends on where you go to school benlinkknilneb. Not all schools are the same, and just like any other big-ticket purchase item, you should evaluate the quality of the education you buy, to make sure you're buying a quality product. Some schools are scams, and some will provide you a world class education.

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[AnanthaP]

So, we cook up things. Ha.

Early on (in this thread - not in the good old days of great coders), there was a thought that Micro$oft will make and sell templates for every app. Should that be taken up separately?

The fact is that the ratio of packaged apps (packages) to bespoke code is growing. Its good sign. This should be seen in the light of "dilettante"'s assertion about custom built ASP pages. They are indded non standard and non-scalable.

End

 

[Tarwn]

benlinkknilneb I understand where your coming from, but think this will improve as time goes by. Remember that this field is still a relatively new one as far as schools are concerned. I was lucky, in that the school I attended only had a single math professor (Agronomist?) who taught CS courses, and that was generally only one course a semester as his Math schedule allowed.
As time goes by I fully expect to see schools shifting to a larger percentage of cooks and chefs teaching. Where the food comes from is still important, so you will have your occasional agronomist.

AnanthaP I can only answer this from a personal point of view. I think that it is easy to be lazy when hand coding and easy to write scalable code when your using packages (because they handle it for you), but I don't believe this makes hand-written code either non-scalable or non-standard. There is no standard in ASP/VBScript, and that is part of the problem. Each package institutes it's onwn guidelines in how it will create the code to fulfill the users guidelines. Everyone has their own recipe book, but some people buy them from the store and therefore share a common way of doing things.
I handwrite a great deal of my code. I would say all, but I use VB and .Net occasionally. I try to plan ahead for the future need of the client, keep the code commented, the variables names in a standard format and descriptive, etc. I plan out the application before ever thinking about the code. I think these steps are important whether your hand coding or using a dvelopment tool. Skipping these steps and relying on a tool is no better a practice than skipping them and hacking some code together. The development tool only lessens the negative effects, it doesn't remove them all together. But by the very act of lessening the negative effects, it actually compounds them, allowing people to take supposed shortcuts that will likely cause problems down the road, while increasing their predilection towards programming in a lazy fashion.

-Tarwn

_{01010100 01101001 01100101 01110010 01101110 01101111 01101011 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101}
^{29 3K 10 3D 3L 3J 3K 10 32 35 10 3E 39 33 35 10 3K 3F 10 38 31 3M 35 10 36 3I 35 35 10 3K 39 3D 35 10 1Q 19}
Do you know how hot your computer is running at home? I do

http://www.tiernok.com/hscripts/systemp.asp

 

[CajunCenturion]

Tarwn - I'm not sure what you mean by a relatively new field with respect to education, but I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science 1981, and during my 4 years, had the pleasure of being instructed by seven different professors with Ph.D.'s in Computer Science (primarily in the junior and senior level classes), with three more during graduate school. I had other professors with doctorates in other disciplines (math, statistics, physics, etc), but only 1 of them taught any classes in computer science. I consider myself to quite fortunate, but I don't think you'll find this an unusual situation at an accredited university, at least not in the USA, offering degrees in Computer Science.

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[Rhys666]

Nice thread, only one comment, (and my apologies to dillettante I'm not complaining only commenting based on experience...), and that is the oft used over generalisation, (and here's the quote I don't want abuse over), which basically goes,
"...So we end up with a lot of microwaving by unskilled employees, some burger-flippers (low-end "programmers&quot, and a few high-paid chefs (contract programmers)..."

My only point being that I've known people who are Great Chefs of immaculate skill who have ended up working as Microwavers and Burger Flippers by the circumstances in their particular employment market or out of the life-choice of having less demand on their home life, where as some high-paid chefs I've worked with couldn't boil a kettle using the instructions without burning the water!



Rhys
Thought out... Maybe,
Opinionated... Probably
But it is only an opinion!

 

[Tarwn]

Hmm, ok, I had meant relatively new as about 30 years, but perhaps I was mistaken. I also have trouble with lengths of time greater than a couple months, so a little while ago means a few hours ago or anywhere from 3 months ago to 10 years ago

Come to think of it, Cornell had a pretty large set up when I was there for a summer, and that was about ten years ago, so I see your point. I have heard a lot of horror stories though. My old boss/chair of CS dept was an ACM speaker and he would constantly come back with stories of CS degrees being taught from the Math Dept, or programs that hadn't been updated since they had been created 10 to 20 years before.

-Tarwn

_{01010100 01101001 01100101 01110010 01101110 01101111 01101011 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101}
^{29 3K 10 3D 3L 3J 3K 10 32 35 10 3E 39 33 35 10 3K 3F 10 38 31 3M 35 10 36 3I 35 35 10 3K 39 3D 35 10 1Q 19}
Do you know how hot your computer is running at home? I do

http://www.tiernok.com/hscripts/systemp.asp

 

[KenCunningham]

"or programs that hadn't been updated since they had been created 10 to 20 years before."

Eeeeeeek! Is that the spectre of Y2K I see before me!

For what it's worth we have 'legacy' systems still running (with no hardware support of course!) which were written ten years ago and still going strong. Unfortunately, there's no-one left who knows a thing about them, so they'll have to be migrated sooner rather than later - step in the consultants as we no longer have an applications section to do the job. I suppose you could call it outsourcing by the back door, but I don't think it's happened by design, just by lack of funding/a degree of incompetence over the years.

 

[palbano]

So has this thread completely side tracked from the original question? There is a (lack of skills) thread in the Ethics forum already and I don’t see how that issue is related to the (In 10 years we won’t need programmers) issue.

-pete

 

[sleipnir214]

dilettante:
A star for you excellent analogy!

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!

 

[xutopia]

LadyHawk,

Your friend had a valid point but his conclusion is unfortunatly wrong. Tools will be built but it will expand the possibilites we are faced with rather than diminish them. The more tools we have the more tools we can create. The more tools we have the more problems we can fix and sometimes the more problems we can recognize.

Now for the cute personal story :

When I was a kid my father told me he had to grind his own coffee every day. Sometimes he even had to roast his own beans. Today it all comes to us packaged and to consume all we need is a percolator.

The naive kid I was thought that the day I'd have kids I'd bestow them with a world fitted with tools that would work for them. They could then concentrate on the more important things in life like travelling to distant stars to find out if any harbored life, saving space with square cans or better yet, finding out the meaning of life.

As I travelled through Europe a couple years later I saw huge coffee making machines I had never seen before.

Curious, I looked at some of these beasts and got explanations by some French waiter that loved Canadians and had time to spare for my questions.

He explained that cappucino and expresso machines try to pack as much pressure as possible so that a foam is built up in the process. The more pressure the more foam and taste and people enjoyed this.

Enthusiastically he described the race towards the better, faster, thicker foam that humans had set out to make. It dawned on me as he was explaining what collossal pressure built up in the guts of the monsters that humans would always find new things to do. They would with their current tool set create new tools. They would at my dismay constantly race towards oblivious disinterest of the meaning of life.

Politely I thanked him for answering my question. I thanked him for unwarily crushing my utopian beliefs.

There are infinite possibilities in this world and too few of us to figure out all of them. Eventually in a billions years or so, if we haven't blown ourselves up, we might have time off work to do some thinking about life and stars and what the meaning of it all is. In the meantime we'll build better coffee machines, computers programming languages and cars and other things that benefit us in some way or other (though roasting and grinding your own beans could be pleasurable).

Eventually it'll be of less interest to us and we'll reach for the planets because we all know how naive it is to think that a star could habord life -- planets do. ;-)

Gary

http://www.xutopia.com

Haran
********************************

 

[Rhys666]

Wow!!!
Fair play Xutopia, I think I just heard the fat lady singing for this thread....

Rhys
Thought out... Maybe,
Opinionated... Probably
But it is only an opinion!

 

[dilettante]

I think my rambling rant above (a 4 AM venture, not the best time to publish in any form) really was[i/] an attempt to address the thread's root issue.

I was trying to say that market forces continue to drive RAD solutions to more and more problems. While this should be a good thing, taking pressure off the small number of chefs, appreciation for good cooking has dwindled because palettes are dulled.

I agree lots of people are misemployed or misrepresent themselves. It also seems true that those who could be doing "greater" things sometimes have to take what work they find, some of this being because harder/smarter efforts are not understood as being different from heating microwave popcorn.

Somebody will have to build the RAD tools and environmental software, but getting a foot in there will just get harder. Platform commoditization will problably continue to reduce the number of these people needed by the industry as well.

What was that bad movie where "all food is Taco Bell?"

 

[dilettante]

Oh well, no more TGML for me!

BTW these "RAD" thingies are nothing new. Remember Cobol Report Writer introduced in C74 if not C68? That sort of "templatized" writing reports. And most of the Cobol-generating 4GL products were really just a set of parameters used to flesh out one of several "template" programs for various common tasks.

 

[Tarwn]

Just note on my previous thread: program as in a class track through school or a curriculum. To reword:
... or curriculums(sp?) that hadn't been updated since they had been created 10 to 20 years before.

And with my track record so far in this thread, I think I'll give up at this point

-Tarwn


_{01010100 01101001 01100101 01110010 01101110 01101111 01101011 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101}
^{29 3K 10 3D 3L 3J 3K 10 32 35 10 3E 39 33 35 10 3K 3F 10 38 31 3M 35 10 36 3I 35 35 10 3K 39 3D 35 10 1Q 19}
Do you know how hot your computer is running at home? I do

http://www.tiernok.com/hscripts/systemp.asp

 

[manarth]

isn't C just a template tool to avoid having to code in assembly?

<marc> i wonder what will happen if i press this...[ul][li]please give feedback on what works / what doesn't[/li][li]need some help? how to get a better answer: faq581-3339[/li][/ul]

 

[syntotic]

Will programmers become redundant?
On the long run, yes. On the very long run. There's people out there trying earnestly to pave the way for a human-like artificial intelligence. And isn't it a CS milestone? An AI can have a huge advantage over humans in that it can directly sense code and work faster. Not that I expect to see that beast in my time, but it makes me feel like a pioneer, belonging to an era when humans actually wrote code instead of having a machine doing it for them, the same way now we have automated car factories instead of artisans. CS is in fact a young field, still looking for better ways to do things, where better means not only technically but also economically. It is the market need to cut costs and increase profits that has driven the RAD/template/framework rush. And also the reason behind the avalanche of microwavers. If we only relied on chefs to prepare our dishes, we, as a society, would be starving. So let the microwavers choose the tool that suits them best and let them serve the corner's restaurant; cooks will prepare the best dishes for gourmet$ and everybody is happy. More important, cooks will keep on inventing new dishes and someday they'll find mana: the human-like AI (or something close enough) that will make all cooks obsolete.

Yet, currently wizard-oriented programming is a mined field for professionals. It lets you get far very quickly but will give you little experience points except on the use of the tool. You get tweakable solutions, but you need also the knowledge as to where and how and why to apply the tweak. You become an expert in a tool that may be replaced in a matter of months by a new, industry-standard tool. You don't get a position because you cannot demonstrate having being born with the tool, even though you've solved bigger problems using notepad, C, Windows native API, competitor's tool, you name it. You win time, only to lose it working around a tool's bugs, limitations, idiosincratic behaviors, etc. Companies use such a bewildered mix of tools that no matter how current you stay, you just don't fit any job posting. Development is easy, but optimum performance requires internal knowledge of the system/platform. And so on and on.

Templates and tools are not making programmers redundant, on the contrary, they increase the demand for better programmers. In terms of the kitchen metaphor: restaurants need cordon bleu cheffs because a microwaver wouldn't know how to cook all the dishes in the menu.

 

[CognosProfessional]

Great posts...some great points...
&quot;Specialized&quot; programmers are needed, and will be needed in our lifetime. Especially Master Chef's. If you want respect and a rewarding carreer, become a Master Chef at one programming language. The Master Chef should know how to integrate with all the cooks. Having that tid bits extra &quot;other&quot; knowlege for political purposes helps...but only will come with experience.
Hence the saying: &quot;Jack of all trades, master of none&quot; Strikes me as a lack of respect for the job applicant with the so called &quot;broad&quot; knowledge of various applications, and &quot;well-versed&quot; knowledge of nothing. I think H.R. recruiters are looking at this closer in this job crunch.
Meaning of Life? Yes. We are way strayed... I don't believe that we were put on this earth to spend 40% of our lives sleeping, 50% of our lives working, and only 10% of our lives interacting with family and learning something new. The new generation will reflect this teaching of the past 20 years and take it with them in the next. I love the comment on super programming available in the future to allow time for the new generation to figure out ways to find life on stars. Wonder If I will be around for that moment.


CP

 

[mutant]

I think I addressed this in another thread, but here goes my thoughts again.

1) You will always need extremely technical programmers writing systems software to develop the OS, compilers, etc.
2) The direction of all organizations should be to consolidate their systems around a core DBMS. The function of computers is to monitor resources, store knowledge, deduce knowledge, or do things like send me a bill for my telephone. The needs will primarily require data administrators to design the schemas (logical and physical), provide easy to understand metadata dictionaries and data dictionaries, manage access to the data, control data integrity through the use of stored procedures (preferably written in native SQL, but could be written in Java, COBOL, C, ...), and in general be the driving force for all systems. These databases may be typical OLTP for business applications, real-time applications to monitor things like phone usage, time-series, image management, document management, OLAP systems, ... whatever. The key is managing the knowledge and providing efficient and secure access. These data administrators will become very powerful in the any organization. Remember when the accountants had all the data, and then the computer people said &quot;hey we can store that all for you in the computer&quot;. Well, the result was that the accountants lost control of their data and didn't have the same level of power anymore.
3) You will need database administrators to perform backups and restores, and possibly deal with performance issues.
4) Applications will be split into two arenas: the big applications and the small applications. Big applications will require some programming staff to support organization wide applications. But for small applications, the programmers will be and should be the local experts (accountants, engineers, managers,...). Access to the data will be via what the data administrators have defined in the metadata and data dictionaries. Control to the data will be via stored procedures that are managed through well defined access rights.
5) You will continue to need staff to install computers, repair computers, provide helpdesk activities, support LAN/telecom activities, and need specialists like security experts.

I have seen major applications developed around a core DBMS and MS Excel. Once developed by the data adminstrator and centralized programmers, the support of the application was pushed off onto the accountants. The accountants were able to learn VB and write any new macros they needed. Only when the core components that communicated asynchronously with the DBMS needed tweaked or experienced technical issues did the core programmers need to get involved.

In general, serious programming will be systems software people, those supporting stored procedures for the data administrator, and some core applications programmers.

Although new systems software is becoming self-healing (IBM DB2 V8.x for OS/390), and it may eventually be like hardware that automatically calls home to the vendor to report a problem (IBM mainframes do this). There will still need to be someone at the other end to answer the call. There will also need to be someone that develops the applications that are smart enough to call home, or be classified as self-healing.

Also, DBMSs are becoming so important that you will even see major operating systems like IBM's z/OS using the DBMS to manage and control aspects of the system. So, the question here will be, what is in charge - the OS or the DBMS?

Programmers becoming redundant? It depends on whether you are talking about. Highly technical systems software people, data administrators, core applications programmers, or quick-and-dirty applications programmers.

 

[Stevehewitt]

I'm getting fed up with this thread dissing &quot;quick-and-dirty programmers&quot;. I am an IT professional.

I am a network admin, and I would never call a newbie, part timer or in-experienced a quick-and-dirty admin.

I'm playing with Access. Bit of VBA, and slowly onto VB. I have created a couple of website, using FrontPage. I use the WYSIWYG view to generate the main stuff, and then spend most of the time in the code view playing with it. Does it make my site less 'workable' or user friendly than yours? I am learning. I want to learn HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, VB, Java and just about anything really - but I work best by having a sample or template and then playing with the code till I get it to work. In mycase I generate the template in FrontPage and the edit the code. Whats wrong with that?

Steve Hewitt

 

[sleipnir214]

Stevehewitt:
Because for too many beginning programmers, WYSIWYG IDEs go from programming aids to programming crutches.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

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TANSTAAFL!