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I absolutely disagree. There is no future in software development as a job How can you make such a blanket statement? Software is a more lucrative positio

by iopuy 9y ago

I absolutely disagree. There is no future in software development as a job How can you make such a blanket statement? Software is a more lucrative position for more people now than ever in history. You want to be a manager?? Who will you be managing?? Programs that write other programs??

bitL 9y ago
Programs will write other programs, there is extensive work on this problem in progress with some nice low-hanging fruit available in research already. The future will need genius-level swengs only, all mundane/boilerplate/lookup tasks will be done by semi-automated systems and most swengs won't be needed anymore. I am working in this field and can clearly see where it goes and we finally have means to accomplish it within 1 generation. If you aren't involved in AI/ML/robotics, you are going to be most likely sorry, fighting for low-income developer jobs for those that can't afford automation tools.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  We go through this once a decade. The problem is a fundamental byproduct of the disconnect between humans, to whom mathematics and logic are foreign concepts that take consistent work to internalize and apply, and machines, for whom ambiguity, context, and perspective are foreign concepts that take consistent work to "internalize" and apply. Call me a philistine, but I don't really believe we will ever get the natural->logical language mapping perfect enough to obliterate the need for developers on a massive scale. New languages beget new possibilities, which companies want to employ people to exploit, and so on. Higher-level languages have "obsoleted" the task known as "programming" over and over again, to the point where there will often be 4-5 "automatic programming" layers between the code written by a person and the code that a physical machine executes. It's been 35+ years since your average developer would write machine code directly (i.e., without depending on an "automatic programming" environment (aka "a compiler") under the covers). There will always be a need to translate natural language into logical language.
  - bitL 9y ago
    The thing is there was enormous progress in natural language processing lately; it's now conceivable to enable some simpler forms of programming using your voice commands only (imagine webapp or mobile app builder controlled by voice) that would satisfy needs of 95% of population, putting many companies out of business. Even at top 5 companies there is a panic about it and many managers will tell you in private they personally think in 10 years there won't be many high-income sweng jobs unless you are in ML or related field, as they see demos from their research labs. I guess we will see how this pans out in the end...
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      The thing is that no matter how good NLP becomes, natural language is inherently fuzzy, just like humans are inherently fuzzy. Human languages do not provide the precision that a computer must have. It is possible that the computer can learn to guess correctly in some percentage of cases, perhaps even a very high percentage of cases, but it can never be more than a guess because that information is simply not expressed in conversational English (and I'm monolingual, but I assume it is pretty much the same in other human languages). Perhaps we are moving to a day when all programming will occur verbally, and each programmer will be paired with an Echo which he verbally instructs as it writes a program. But we will still need a person who is assigned with converting natural language to machine language, including reading in the contexts and assumptions necessary to make assumptions that are almost always correct. That's the part that I don't see how computers are ever going to be able to beat humans on. You can't squeeze blood from a stone, and if the data isn't there and isn't in any of the spied-on data collected by all the listening bugs all over the house and all the location bugs carried in a person's car and pocket and all the network bugs on the person's computer and ISP, and so forth, the computer won't have the data necessary to furnish the desired response. Conversational language will not have the necessary precision without special effort being dedicated to expressing ideas in a logical, mathematically-valid way. The people who expend that special effort are called "programmers". IMO the only hope of a programmerless future is one where the language has meshed to the point that every conversational statement is a valid program after the NLP's macros have been expanded or whatever, and the computers understand this with a 0% error rate. A world where a master programmer reprogrammed human language to be computer-native. I don't see us getting there.

by iopuy 9y ago

bitL 9y ago

Programs will write other programs, there is extensive work on this problem in progress with some nice low-hanging fruit available in research already. The future will need genius-level swengs only, all mundane/boilerplate/lookup tasks will be done by semi-automated systems and most swengs won't be needed anymore. I am working in this field and can clearly see where it goes and we finally have means to accomplish it within 1 generation. If you aren't involved in AI/ML/robotics, you are going to be most likely sorry, fighting for low-income developer jobs for those that can't afford automation tools.

cookiecaper 9y ago
We go through this once a decade. The problem is a fundamental byproduct of the disconnect between humans, to whom mathematics and logic are foreign concepts that take consistent work to internalize and apply, and machines, for whom ambiguity, context, and perspective are foreign concepts that take consistent work to "internalize" and apply. Call me a philistine, but I don't really believe we will ever get the natural->logical language mapping perfect enough to obliterate the need for developers on a massive scale. New languages beget new possibilities, which companies want to employ people to exploit, and so on. Higher-level languages have "obsoleted" the task known as "programming" over and over again, to the point where there will often be 4-5 "automatic programming" layers between the code written by a person and the code that a physical machine executes. It's been 35+ years since your average developer would write machine code directly (i.e., without depending on an "automatic programming" environment (aka "a compiler") under the covers). There will always be a need to translate natural language into logical language.
- bitL 9y ago
  The thing is there was enormous progress in natural language processing lately; it's now conceivable to enable some simpler forms of programming using your voice commands only (imagine webapp or mobile app builder controlled by voice) that would satisfy needs of 95% of population, putting many companies out of business. Even at top 5 companies there is a panic about it and many managers will tell you in private they personally think in 10 years there won't be many high-income sweng jobs unless you are in ML or related field, as they see demos from their research labs. I guess we will see how this pans out in the end...
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    The thing is that no matter how good NLP becomes, natural language is inherently fuzzy, just like humans are inherently fuzzy. Human languages do not provide the precision that a computer must have. It is possible that the computer can learn to guess correctly in some percentage of cases, perhaps even a very high percentage of cases, but it can never be more than a guess because that information is simply not expressed in conversational English (and I'm monolingual, but I assume it is pretty much the same in other human languages). Perhaps we are moving to a day when all programming will occur verbally, and each programmer will be paired with an Echo which he verbally instructs as it writes a program. But we will still need a person who is assigned with converting natural language to machine language, including reading in the contexts and assumptions necessary to make assumptions that are almost always correct. That's the part that I don't see how computers are ever going to be able to beat humans on. You can't squeeze blood from a stone, and if the data isn't there and isn't in any of the spied-on data collected by all the listening bugs all over the house and all the location bugs carried in a person's car and pocket and all the network bugs on the person's computer and ISP, and so forth, the computer won't have the data necessary to furnish the desired response. Conversational language will not have the necessary precision without special effort being dedicated to expressing ideas in a logical, mathematically-valid way. The people who expend that special effort are called "programmers". IMO the only hope of a programmerless future is one where the language has meshed to the point that every conversational statement is a valid program after the NLP's macros have been expanded or whatever, and the computers understand this with a 0% error rate. A world where a master programmer reprogrammed human language to be computer-native. I don't see us getting there.