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.
EDIT: This blew up. Muting the thread for some peace and quiet.
@liw There were things that pulled stuff away from programmers though. Much of it at the time was hidden by the growth in demand.
Excel, BASIC, some expert systems, Hypercard, DBase and friends all enabled an army of not-really-programmer people to get real work done without having to become programming experts of any kind.
None of them hallucinated or ate entire data centres for lunch. Their output was predictable if slow and they kept working over upgrades in general.
Better slushpiles and slushpile indexes, maybe enough! Stack Overflow briefly overwrote that skill
“Slushpile” used to be all the code one had written, with employer secrets removed, whether it had ever seen use or not, organized so that you could reuse work. Data and UI structures that were not a good fit for earlier features might be useful now. Shake them out, improve while trying, put them away a little better.
I worked on a big team that had a nascent group slushpile for its giant long term software. This was way before git so harder than it would be with modern merging.
background: I believe programmers borrowed “slushpile” from publishers. Publishers use it to mean all the submissions that come in without an agent, so, derogatory. For programmers it kind of means the manuscripts the publisher sent back, I guess.
@clew Makes sense. Most of my life I've been programming for myself so I've rarely had to maintain a concept for rejected work.
One time was funny. It was my first pure software engineering job. We broke up a task and I had a piece to write. We were all told to use Hungarian notation. I hated it but I did it.
I was the only person who did it. No one else had paid attention. So despite some well-deserved embarrassment from the others, I was the one who had to rewrite all my code, as the combined effort to rewrite everyone else's code would have been too much.
I didn't know it at the time, but this was to be a signpost for my entire career to date. :P
Do you have a place or concept for code you tried and put aside?
(“Nobody else did the obligatory thing” - argh, familiar.)
Lars Wirzenius
The Penguin of Evil
Mason Loring Bliss
clew