> Who needs to code when you can use visual building blocks or even plain English to describe intent?
Stopped reading there, despite predictions this has not happened in the last 20 years and I see no evidence that it will happen in the next 20.
Stopped reading there, despite predictions this has not happened in the last 20 years and I see no evidence that it will happen in the next 20.
I had another colleague at a different job, a chemistry PhD so (on paper at least) a smart guy, but he genuinely could not get his head around the idea that software was something that was written. Software was something that was found and the skill was like the skill of being a gold prospector in the hills panning for that program that would do what you wanted.
I think the author is wrong but not because we won't have visual building blocks and flexible language interfaces. Rather because event if you try to describe what you induction cooking plate does for you using visual building blocks and English language you still end up with pretty tangled mess that only real programmer could have patience for.
Sorry, I should have been less succinct - I totally agree with you, visual languages already exist and are improving all the time. I don't believe that they will lead to a world without programmers for the reasons you state. They are just another way to express syntax, they don't reduce the complexity of the actual problem being solved.
From the same book (p. 84): "Stephanie Shirley, who started a contract programming company in the early 1960s, later recalled: 'When COBOL was introduced, we thought that would be the end of the company, that nobody would be buying software anymore – programming – because it was just so easy.'"