I guess we've all been programmers since we got our first VCR. But I think there is a real qualitative difference these days between someone who can write a pro

I guess we've all been programmers since we got our first VCR. But I think there is a real qualitative difference these days between someone who can write a program and someone who is actually quite good at doing so. We commonly talk of a 10x difference in ability between programmers (and I won't go into the truth of that here) but it's not unreasonable to expect that the difference between the best and the worst programmers will widen by another order of magnitude in the future. Really the argument is semantics. Technology (and software programmed by genuinely skilled programmers) is making it easier and easier for people who would otherwise be poor programmers to achieve a result - even if it is a strange sort of chimera cookie-cutter application that only sort of meets their needs. (This is what Microsoft does with software for the enterprise.) We'll all become programmers in the sense that we're all now omniscient due to the introduction of mobile phones with web browsers built in and the availability of search results on tap through said web browsers.