Old, large tapestries were often gigantic, complex, expensive, time-consuming, exquisitely intricate carpets that hung on walls. They could take from years to d

Old, large tapestries were often gigantic, complex, expensive, time-consuming, exquisitely intricate carpets that hung on walls. They could take from years to decades to complete, and consume fortunes. One of their primary functions was to show off how wealthy or important you were. Now that we have machines that can do weaving and sew patterns automatically, it's possible to create a tapestry without as much time and expense. But until recent times it was time-consuming, laborious, difficult, and expensive. One day we'll have machines to write code for us in minutes that would have taken weeks or months for humans, and we won't need to pay people to slave over keyboards to churn out pithy little programs and litter source code repositories all over the internet. We won't have to whine about the unkept documentation, or use complex systems that feed random data into test harnesses just to find the bugs that we accidentally put into the code. One day programmers will be obsolete. Until the new machines come around to replace us, our software tapestries are going to remain really frigging difficult to make. So, yes, without proper financing, most of them will probably be abandoned. What I'm wondering is: how many of the new machines already exist, but we can't use them because they're proprietary or patented?