On 2017-09-23 22:40, Victor Odhner wrote:
> I just found time to catch up with PLUG, and now as an obsolete programmer
> (in recovery for 4.5 years) I have to ramble a bit.
>
> But in a few words, my point is: human thought builds on the past. Of course,
> learning details of old skills may be interesting, but ceases to be
> profitable for most. We need to create new things, learn new ways to perceive
> and tackle bigger challenges. There are opportunities out there that we can't
> even imagine until we go for it.
>
> In Heinlen's 1953 story, Starman Jones serves as a "computerman," flipping
> switches to enter astrogation data in raw binary. That's how they did things
> in 1953's future. Some of the early Star Trek tools and procedures became
> comical as reality overtook fiction. (I remember a programmer deftly entering
> binary addresses or commands, one octade with each swipe of his hand, to boot
> up a big I/O unit, back about 1969.)
>
> First there was raw code, octal or hex. Someone invented the assembler, that
> made it more readable and supplied some macros. Then came the FORmula
> TRANslator (aka compiler), a giant step. My programming started with ALGOL,
> and I went through obscure languages including some Prolog, and ended with C,
> shell and Perl. I became a dinosaur as Java took hold -- I had burnt out
> learning all that an asterisk means in umpteen languages. I made web pages in
> 1994, and now I can't read the source code of the enormous, multilayered
> machine-generated pages.
>
> Where I now volunteer doing facilities chores, I just fell off my IT-recovery
> wagon to learn Access and SharePoint (yeah, they're committed to MS) to build
> a simple work-order entry and reporting tool. In my first hour of study I was
> informed by a Microsoft message box that we should move on to PowerApps
> instead, because it's mobile-savvy and has more layers of ready-made tooling.
> I wouldn't want to leave StreetLightUSA.com [3] looking for the last decade's
> obsolete MS skills . . . .
>
> ---
> I do not have the depth of your experience. I was first exposed to
> programming in 1983 as an accounting Major at the UofA. At that time
> business majors were required to take intro to computers which was
> programming in Fortran. Accounting majors were required to also take a class
> in Cobol. I liked Cobol and changed my major to MIS.
>
> Cobol in academia was structured and organized. An internship with the city
> of Tucson exposed me to a different Cobol - a Cobol that was difficult to
> debug because it was spaghetti code with lots of go-to's and lacked
> structure.
>
> Those were the days of punch cards and single line editors.
>
> You write of MS-Access... the only option for desktop database application
> development unless you add Java and dot net. This is an undeserved niche. I
> took a look at MS-Access recently and found you are required a license for
> each P.C. I suspect you can run it on a server and expose it to each client
> w/o needing more than one license. I did not get that far into my research
> because I have been spoiled by FoxPro and open source.
>
> I was a dBase developer for almost 15 years, programming with multiple
> dialects of dBase, until MS bought and killed off FoxPro.
>
> I believe (an assumption of mine) that there is a real need for something
> simple like Visual FoXPro to build custom applications for small businesses.
> Then again I could be missing the boat because today everything needs to be
> able to interconnect with everything else.
>
> Things have gotten much more complicated. I have had to build new skills
> several times and am doing it again. There is a developer in Scotland that I
> have followed and he says one should take every fourth year off for learning
> and skill building. I think we need to structure our learning into weekly
> chunks of 5 - to hours.
>
> I sure wish I could find something like VFoxPro...... I miss those days.
>
> ---
>
> I see a continuous growth of new layers, so that we no longer think about
> what lies beneath. Hardware logic was built with vacuum tubes, and now we
> have CPU chips with a lot of the same logic: they don't have to create much
> logic now, though a few brilliant people may be inventing new stuff; mostly
> they just use existing designs. Engineers became programmers, using a
> programming language to evoke known bits of logic into the design of chips.
>
> Starting in 1890 my father's cousin Willgodt built Odhner Arithmometers
> (calculators) by the thousands, and millions of clones were produced
> worldwide until electronic calculators took their place. For my part, in
> about 1970, I did semi-automation to install 18,000 wires onto each 6x2 foot
> CPU back-panel; now the phone in my pocket puts that high-end system to
> shame. Everything shrinks, and gets more complex.
>
> My PC has hardware logic, the BIOS, the operating kernel, the services of the
> OS, and applications such as web browsers. I can write straight HTML, but
> then they added javacode, but wait, there's more: layer upon layer of canned
> tools to save the webmaster from the need to create new code. Now lots of
> people can make web sites, complex ones, in a hurry. And it looks like
> there's a big demand, but not for hacking a lot of HTML.
>
> Arthur C. Clarke publicized the idea of the geostationary broadcast and
> telecommunications satellite, and addressed the problems of power (a
> solar-driven steam engine) and maintenance (someone had to be there, to
> change failed vacuum tubes). He projected that the idea could be realized
> within 50 years. He didn't know that a modern photocell would be patented the
> next year, and transistors would emerge a year later. The first
> satellite-relayed phone call (JFK to the president of Nigeria) came in 1963.
> He was one of the brightest of us, a brilliant futurist, but he
> under-estimated how fast things are moving.
>
> Dr. Edsger Dijkstra, a prominent computer scientist, visited us at the big
> Honeywell Informations Systems factory in Phoenix (now a Best Buy), for
> Engineers' Day, and gave us a talk about proof of correctness in programming.
> During the break, over a soda, I commented to him that my program code was
> simple minded, but most of my work was determining what results we wanted. He
> nodded, and after the break made a disclaimer with words to this effect:
>
>> _The specification is a firewall between the pleasantness issue and the
>> correctness issue. Correctness applies to the program code, and its
>> correctness can be proven. But nobody can prove that what you asked for will
>> be what you really wanted._
>
> It's fun coding to the bare metal, but yes, it's mostly been done.
>
> A programmer-analyst is a translator, converting requests and observations
> into _an approximation_ of the desired automation. But those skills apply to
> lots of things, not just automation. The involve listening, observing,
> thinking logically, giving a hoot, and being willing to step outside the box.
>
> Programming as we know it will be obsolete, but the sky's the limit.
> __________________
>
> On Sep 14, 2017, at 12:59:50, David Schwartz <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> For now, I think that IFTTT and Zapier represent the "leading edge" of where
> programming is heading for lots of otherwise routine needs.
>
> With the growth of SaaS, it's becoming more of a problem of simply "wiring
> things together" than programming.
>
> I'd say that well more than half of my coding is simply what I call
> "plumbing", and the only reason it takes so frigging long is that people are
> still overly concerned about "efficiency" in areas where it's virtually
> irrelevant.
>
> Back in the early 80's I had lots of quite vehement arguments with OS guys
> about how the only real way to solve some of the problems we were facing was
> to send raw ASCII data with self-identifying flags over the wire, and they'd
> scream back that this was simply too inefficient, and we had to come up with
> a bazillion "cannonical data tables" to define every possible common string
> we could think of so we only needed to send a one or two-byte value instead
> of a string.
>
> They were of the school, "Hey, do you guys remember joke #729? What a whopper
> that one was, eh?!"
>
> HTML came on the scene and us old farts almost choked over the fact that it
> was stateless and you had to send the entire freaking page back and forth,
> often multiple times, just to do the simplest things.
>
> Here we are 20 years later and javascript has finally overcome the stateless
> nature of web pages so now we can send several KB of data back and forth
> between the client and the server without updating the screen, but those
> hidden transactions end up moving far more data in many cases than what it
> takes to refresh the entire screen. And caching has gotten a lot more
> refined, which reduces the need for data to move around.
>
> Anyway, we're going to see more ground taking along the lines of making
> common problems solvable without programming. This is what IFTTT and Zapier
> are doing, among others.
>
> The tradeoffs will be time-to-market vs. where a new requirement falls along
> a dimension of "common/generic vs. fully custom" in terms of UI, UX, and
> logic.
>
> At some point, we'll see voice-controlled solution drivers that assemble
> IFTTT and Zapier in the background!
>
> This is NOT "programming". It may end up replacing a lot of Really Boring
> Jobs, but who cares? Is this the kind of stuff YOU want to do as a
> programmer? I sure don't!
>
> -David Schwartz
>
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 9:23 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>>
>> I just read this article :
>> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learning-how-code-still-worth-rajat-bhageria
>> [1] which predicts that computers will be self coding and coding skills will
>> be obsolete.
>>
>> I've read other such articles in the recent past. I'm also reading about
>> robots replacing jobs.... And as a precursor sending jobs off-shore will
>> become the norm. I get contacted all the time by Indian programmers willing
>> to work for 10% of what an American contractor is willing to work for.
>> Even though I never have, I know there is a lot of challenges of working
>> with offshore Indian programmers... And I know there is a lot of challenges
>> working with American employees...
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