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Comment by shusson | Hacker News Reader

> Commercial software engineering is a creative endeavor; it is not a science, nor is it a manufacturing process.

Do you think software engineering will remain a creative endeavour in the future?

We've only been programming in high level languages for 60-70 years. All the while Moore's law has been in effect.

I think doing the engineering design of structures and machines (buildings, bridges, engines, etc.) is still a creative endeavor after many hundreds of years, and I think this is the closest analogue to what software engineers do. The difference is that once we have the blueprints drawn (ie. the code written), a computer can just execute them rather than requiring a lot more material and labor inputs. Program execution is the right analogue to manufacturing, not program creation.

I agree with this, but those things have also moved from essentially being artisanal to being more formalized and scientific. I don't think we're at that point in software engineering.

We're definitely earlier in the timeline with software engineering, but I personally think it seems like structural and mechanical engineering designs are a lot more "artisanal" than is the general conception. Certainly the primitives involved are very well understand scientifically (and this is where we're definitely a long way behind them), but the specific combinations of those primitives strike me as remaining very bespoke and creative, as does the process for creating the designs. All of this looks familiar to me, just further down the maturity timeline.

Oof. I have no idea. But since it'll be fun to guess:

Absent some kind of magical (from today's POV) AGI, I think I'd probably say yes, but I'm not sure that means software engineering will continue to look the way it does today, at least not universally.

My expectation is a pretty linear extrapolation of history. I think new tools and higher levels of abstraction will emerge that will make certain types of tasks unnecessary or a lot faster. We'll still need people working on compilers and embedded software, but a lot of really basic forms of software development (think Excel replacements) will be A LOT faster and easier to do.

Fundamentally, though, business problems are really fucking specific, and you need a really fucking specific language to express and solve those problems. The process of applying those languages to problems is a creative one. I don't think this dynamic will change for a really long time, if ever.

That's what tools like Visual Basic and Delphi were meant to do, and actually were pretty good at for their time. As far as I can tell, we still haven't nearly caught up to the browser/cloud equivalent of these tools.

Things need to sit still for a while longer I guess, but I think there's also some industry changes to blame. In the 90s there was big money in making tools and components for software engineers, while nowadays everyone just uses the best free thing they can find. Granted the free things are way better than they were in the 90s, but I think they're largely killing the market for better things that cost money.

Look at low code tools. There's money, market demand, and many tool vendors.

“Do you think software engineering will remain a creative endeavour in the future?”

I would think so. If something can be automated or be done with a reproducible process it will get automated or performed by lower paid people. But I can easily see how software and automated processes will reach a point of “good enough” for most purposes sometime in the future and there will be much less software engineers doing creative work. For example I would expect a lot of repetitive front end backend work will go away.

I would expect the opposite. As the mechanical stuff becomes cheaper and more automated, the creative work decreases in proportion but increases in absolute terms.

My two cents: is that really the problem? I don't think so.

I mean that the non-creative part is the problem. Why would anybody want to eliminate the creative part and leave the mindless factory-like part?

And there is a huge non-creative, tedious work in programming. A lot of workarounds, minutiae, leaky abstractions, kludges and plain simple idiocy that doesn't get removed because "it's too much work".

Music has remained pretty much a creative thing through most exponential explosions of technology that affected it profoundly. What's the most crazy futuristic scenario where software engineering stops being a creative field?

We have programming languages for creating and evolving organic lifeforms? You are basically creating plants, pets, "superworkers" or "super soldiers", or artists? That's going to still be creative. Like raising a child is creative. Same thing for stuff that can have an ego driven consciousness like most forms of AGI.

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