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No, it really super isn't. Look, I'm all for teaching CS/programming to toddlers through people in their 90s - but the blunt, brutal reality is that not everyon

No, it really super isn't. Look, I'm all for teaching CS/programming to toddlers through people in their 90s - but the blunt, brutal reality is that not everyone can do this work. Full stop. That does not make programming a good candidate for widespread, blue-collar work.

vinceguidry 8y ago
Frameworks will eventually turn most jobs we do now into low-skill office jobs. Maybe not WordPress 6.0, but WordPress 10.0 certainly will be easy enough for just about anybody to use. We won't call them programmers, but they'll be doing all the jobs we used to do, if we're lucky enough to have moved up. Just how like tasks that used to be done by doctors are now done by nurses, and tasks that used to be done by lawyers are now done by increasingly large staffs of paralegals and secretaries, coding will eventually be stratified like everything else. I would argue it's more inevitable in this one than it ever was in those fields.
- king_magic 8y ago
  No, they won't. Frameworks often introduce new layers of complexity and abstract away important details to the point where either entirely new frameworks are eventually needed, or you need an army of "framework specialists" who understand the subtleties of particular frameworks - and who end up needing to re-specialize on shiny new frameworks when old ones are discarded in an endless cycle of framework insanity. In my 25 years of programming, I've never seen the ever-progressing march of new frameworks really solve the underlying technical difficulty of engineering software. Sometimes they help, more often than not they hurt, and are more often than not ephemeral in the grand scheme of things.
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    25 years is the blink of an eye.
    - king_magic 8y ago
      My point is: frameworks (when they work) simply unlock the next level of complex problems for general "tackle-ability", and those problems require hard engineering to solve. We certainly haven't run out of complex computing/software engineering problems to tackle yet, and I simply do not see that slowing down.
      - vinceguidry 8y ago
        The process of stratification is not driven by inherent complexity. You're absolutely right in that we still have, and will always have, hard problems to solve in software. What I'm referring to is the fact that businesses do not have to solve all of these problems. And businesses are what ultimately drive the field. Think of all the other really complicated fields out there. Music, law, medicine. Still hard problems to solve in all of them. Let's take music as the example at hand. We'll never reach the end of what's possible to accomplish with music. Yet there is an entire industry around it that commodifies musical services. You can spend an entire career focused on something exceedingly arcane like mid-sized arena acoustical materials. We haven't gotten that way yet with information technology, not because we can't get there, but because the field is still so very very young. Music has been an industry for thousands of years. The modern arena builds on technologies developed for theatre in ancient Greece. You're right, each advance makes for new problems to solve. But unless you can make a credible claim that this time it's different, the field we inhabit and make a good living exploiting will move the same way every single other engineering field throughout history has always moved.
    - corey_moncure 8y ago
      It's also about one third of the entire history of computer programming.
- Aardwolf 8y ago
  I usually am hampered by frameworks, too limiting, I work better with free to form code and as self contained as possible libraries with flexible "do one thing well" responsabilities Frameworks probably only make some specific things easier? But given the choice between spending an hour fighting against a framework, or an hour solving the same problem with more elegant tools, the latter is so much more useful in both result and what you learn from it. Where does the above style fit in?

vinceguidry 8y ago

Frameworks will eventually turn most jobs we do now into low-skill office jobs. Maybe not WordPress 6.0, but WordPress 10.0 certainly will be easy enough for just about anybody to use. We won't call them programmers, but they'll be doing all the jobs we used to do, if we're lucky enough to have moved up. Just how like tasks that used to be done by doctors are now done by nurses, and tasks that used to be done by lawyers are now done by increasingly large staffs of paralegals and secretaries, coding will eventually be stratified like everything else. I would argue it's more inevitable in this one than it ever was in those fields.

king_magic 8y ago
No, they won't. Frameworks often introduce new layers of complexity and abstract away important details to the point where either entirely new frameworks are eventually needed, or you need an army of "framework specialists" who understand the subtleties of particular frameworks - and who end up needing to re-specialize on shiny new frameworks when old ones are discarded in an endless cycle of framework insanity. In my 25 years of programming, I've never seen the ever-progressing march of new frameworks really solve the underlying technical difficulty of engineering software. Sometimes they help, more often than not they hurt, and are more often than not ephemeral in the grand scheme of things.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  25 years is the blink of an eye.
  - king_magic 8y ago
    My point is: frameworks (when they work) simply unlock the next level of complex problems for general "tackle-ability", and those problems require hard engineering to solve. We certainly haven't run out of complex computing/software engineering problems to tackle yet, and I simply do not see that slowing down.
    - vinceguidry 8y ago
      The process of stratification is not driven by inherent complexity. You're absolutely right in that we still have, and will always have, hard problems to solve in software. What I'm referring to is the fact that businesses do not have to solve all of these problems. And businesses are what ultimately drive the field. Think of all the other really complicated fields out there. Music, law, medicine. Still hard problems to solve in all of them. Let's take music as the example at hand. We'll never reach the end of what's possible to accomplish with music. Yet there is an entire industry around it that commodifies musical services. You can spend an entire career focused on something exceedingly arcane like mid-sized arena acoustical materials. We haven't gotten that way yet with information technology, not because we can't get there, but because the field is still so very very young. Music has been an industry for thousands of years. The modern arena builds on technologies developed for theatre in ancient Greece. You're right, each advance makes for new problems to solve. But unless you can make a credible claim that this time it's different, the field we inhabit and make a good living exploiting will move the same way every single other engineering field throughout history has always moved.
  - corey_moncure 8y ago
    It's also about one third of the entire history of computer programming.
Aardwolf 8y ago
I usually am hampered by frameworks, too limiting, I work better with free to form code and as self contained as possible libraries with flexible "do one thing well" responsabilities Frameworks probably only make some specific things easier? But given the choice between spending an hour fighting against a framework, or an hour solving the same problem with more elegant tools, the latter is so much more useful in both result and what you learn from it. Where does the above style fit in?