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Hey guys, heard about this new programming language? It's almost likey writing English. People reckon it will make writing software so easy that anyone can writ
by brazzy 17y ago
Hey guys, heard about this new programming language? It's almost likey writing English. People reckon it will make writing software so easy that anyone can write whatever software they need - making professional programmers unnecessary within a few years.
It's called COBOL.
(from ca. 1960, that's what people really thought back then)
- Qz 17y agoTo be fair, 'programmer' meant something slightly different back then, and what it used to refer to no longer actually exists.
- brazzy 17y agoWell, it meant someone writing assembler code, and in some shops they'd be given very detailed instructions of what to implement by "program designers" that read almost like English... or code in a high-level language. So yeah, those kind of programmers don't exit anymore, and "designers" are now programmers - but they have to know more about programming because there is no separate programmer to iron out the quirks in the design. Heaping layers of abstraction onto each other is NOT something that will inevitably yield "do what I mean" functionality. What the article describes as Simonyi's "revolutionary idea" is no different than CASE, MDD and MDA - the same (at least) 20 year old pipe dream in various guises that nobody has ever gotten to work except in very narrow fields.