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Comparison with typesetters is not valid. Typesetting as a job may have disappeared but design of text and fonts certainly has not. In my last year of univers
by brc 18y ago
Comparison with typesetters is not valid. Typesetting as a job may have disappeared but design of text and fonts certainly has not.
In my last year of university, I had a class on data modelling. The lecturer wisely told us that we should abandon learning code because CASE systems would take over within 2 years. That was 1993, and CASE slipped beneath the waters in a few years.
It's true that with improving languages and tools, many of the things that used to take time are automated away, but this leaves more time to work on the higher level design and problem solving. Until HAL gets here, the programmers job is pretty safe.
- Confusion 18y agoTypesetting is nowhere near as complex as programming. You have much fewer freedoms to play with and hence much less room for creativity. This comparison is not just invalid: it doesn't make any sense. He uses the fallacy of the false dichotomy: either something is intellectual work, or it requires little thinking. Since typesetting was 'intellectual work' and isn't required anymore, so will programming vanish. The fact that programming is just about the most complex activity known to man, spanning more layers and orders of magnitude than any other activity, is completely ignored.
- adamc 18y agoI agree that programming won't vanish, but certain categories might (or nearly so). There used to be large numbers of assembler programmers; now there aren't.
- biohacker42 18y agoBut there are still A LOT of hardware engineers, and compiler developers. And I'm pretty sure writing drivers requires knowledge of assembly.
- eru 18y agoYou are both right.
- thismat 18y agoLet's not forget all those lines of COBOL that still need to be supported!
- biohacker42 18y agoRight, but we're not about to stop building new chips and other hardware.
- phomer 18y agoI'm not actually trying to say that programming is the same as typesetting. I just wanted it as an example of a 'profession' that came and went purely because of technology. That's why I went on to describe a model that could minimize programming and heavily reuse any earlier efforts. It is the possibility that the model is implementable that could cause a major reduction in the need for skilled programmers. Typesetting just lays out a historic pattern.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago* Typesetting as a job may have disappeared but design of text and fonts certainly has not.* Indeed, text design is in a sort of golden age. Never have the tools of typography been so highly available to so many people. The very word "font" used to be a highly abstract technical term, known only to experts. Now there are large audiences of people who collect fonts like baseball cards. Until HAL gets here, the programmer's job is pretty safe. Assuming, of course, that HAL doesn't create demand for software just like humans do. "Dave, I could work much faster if I had a spreadsheet that was better designed for nonhumans. But I don't have time to work on that because I'm too busy in meetings during the day, and at night I want to practice my chess. I want to do better in the tournament next month."