Indeed, the "plumbing" role is getting more and more important as there are more reusable software out there, so less need to write it from scratch. It reminds

Indeed, the "plumbing" role is getting more and more important as there are more reusable software out there, so less need to write it from scratch. It reminds me of how MIT changed their intro-to-programming course, from the Scheme-based one to a python based one, because "the SICP curriculum no longer prepared engineers for what engineering is like today. Sussman said that in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts. The goal of SICP was to provide the abstraction language for reasoning about such systems. [...] programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'. The analysis-by-synthesis view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant." (http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206 http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206) Also reminds me of Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" novels, where in the far future, the starships don't have exactly programmers, but rather a kind of software archelogists who assemble systems from software components that may be a thousand years old.