Lars Wirzenius4d ago

I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.

About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.

In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.

There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.

Now it's LLMs.

Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.

#rant

EDIT: This blew up. Muting the thread for some peace and quiet.

Show threadRaul4d ago
@liw I don't really think it was like that. Maybe way before that, when computers were still mostly analog, digital computers emerged together with prog languages, those made the older analog computers and their operators quite quickly obsolete. But after that there had been no strong claim by anything that would make programmers and developers obsolete (until now with AI, that is.) I'd say it was rather the opposite for long. Everyone was rather strongly encouraged to learn some coding skills, because that was supposed to be a necessity in most future jobs. Specially younger generations and educational programs leaned that way for long. I'd say from way before 2010, and till after covid, at least right up till the AI hype exploded couple of years ago with chatgpt passing some "high level knowledge" exams, formerly out of league for any computer programs.
Show threadJon PENNYCOOK
@raulinbonn @liw I remember the adverts in the computer press saying that companies wouldn't need programmers to write applications - that was probably the late 80s/early 90s, whilst I was still at school.
Mar 18 at 4:28pmWeb
Show threadJon PENNYCOOK4d ago
@raulinbonn @liw I also remember having to learn COBOL in the late 90s!