Among the many erroneous assumptions this makes is that the demand for software is not elastic or limited by the cost of development. In reality what would happ

Among the many erroneous assumptions this makes is that the demand for software is not elastic or limited by the cost of development. In reality what would happen is that if code becomes cheaper companies will get more than they could before to automate increasingly larger aspects of their infrastructure, improve the quality of their current software, and make custom software more accesible to small businesses. As the very same article says, custom software is more than 90% of all software out there. The cost of licenses for proprietary enterprise software like Oracle, AIX, SAP, etc. is dwarfed by the costs of consulting and customization to make those fit into existing infrastructures. Programmers aren't going anywhere. If anything more people will need training, more computers will need fixing, and more experts will need to be called to fix the newbie's mistakes. Just because there are more programmers in general doesn't mean that the number of competent programmers will increase.