> There is little repetitive, mindless work in programming, because as most of you know, "anything that you can treat as construction can and should be automate

> There is little repetitive, mindless work in programming, because as most of you know, "anything that you can treat as construction can and should be automated." Sure, but there is a cost to automation. We all know the programmers who will attempt to automate God if left to their own devices. cough At some point there is a tradeoff between automating something, and sending an email to an intelligent human being who maybe isn't god level at software architecture but who can fill out some organizational context with pidgen code. I think the idea that the only code that needs to get written is type of a decorator on a subtype Haskell kind of stuff is wrong. It's the same fallacy as people who say we just need physics and all of the natural sciences will shake out of it. We need Richard Stallmans and Terry Davis's to write that stuff for sure, and maybe they are the only True Programmers out there. But there's an awful lot of automation engineering that needs to get done too, and some of that really is just putHotDogIn(basket) (unless Debbie from accounting emails you to say no) and wget http://wordpress.com/dist.zip http://wordpress.com/dist.zip Let me say it another way: there are and will always be gnarled programmers who think in koans and concoct the words we code in, but spread across that will be a thick layer of humans embedded in human systems mapping the minutia of the day in code. I daresay we'll all be doing it. I suppose I agree that work is all design. But the code isn't the part that's being designed. The code is just the log format.