The future is fewer people writing code?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
No, the hard part of programming is understanding in very specific and rigid details how to accomplish a task. What the author doesn't realize is the enormous amount of processing power, shared culture and empathy that goes into human interaction.
Even mighty Google doesn't have the compute power or the architecture to replicate this. Until computers can understand humans at a human-level this will not be possible. Several breakthroughs will be necessary, and even still I expect decades/centuries before it happens if it even happens. Essentially we're talking about the Singularity.
Programmers make it all the time too, or at least something very similar. See all those people who are on the endless quest for the "perfect" language, which usually means one which allows for writing the shortest code, sometimes at a very high cognitive cost for very little payoff. No, I really don't want to do a massive amount of mental backflips just to save a few characters, thanks.
If not, you clearly see some gain in more terse syntax.
Seems like a good thing to explore, although perhaps it should not be one's sole focus in life.
To be fair, many programming language enthusiasts understand this and seek languages that properly frame the problems that need to be solved.
Sometimes languages seem to have a high cognitive cost because they expose that the underlying problem has a high cognitive cost. Some things that seem really simple are actually rather complex, like string manipulation and data sharing.
Apparently many programmers keep forgetting that the syntax is just a small part of:
- language itself
- toolchains (compilers, interpreters, AOT, JIT, hybrid)
- differences between implementations and specific behaviour
- libraries, both standard and the most well known third party ones
- IDEs
- build systems and deployment options
- extra tooling for correctness like static analysers
- culture of the people that usually cater for the language
Hence why it is easy to dabble and grasp concepts from multiple languages, but very hard to very quite proficient in a few of them.
Best way to learn a new programming paradigm is by learning a new programming language conducive towards a certain manner of problem-solving.
So yes, I am obsessed with programming languages. But not for the reasons you listed.
>> No, the hard part of programming is understanding in very specific and rigid details how to accomplish a task.
The real benefit of something like Project Bloks is that it actually
removes the code; it allows children to begin thinking
programmatically, without the obstacle of syntax. And this is a
tough distinction to make, because people often use “programming”
and “coding” synonymously. But the fact of the matter is thinking
programmatically needs to be divorced from writing code: the former
offers large educational value to a broad range of students, while
the latter offers very little.For learning purposes, Project Bloks looks great. But when it comes to real work, I'd happily learn the syntax, as it lets me be more productive.
For professional programmers, many people on this forum, the format that we use (text) is almost certainly the most efficient (yet conceived). It's made better with better tooling, of course, like IDEs that help us refactor, show errors in code as we edit, etc.
The author's point is that many more people will be programming in the future (hopefully) than are today. But not as professional programmers. For them, tools like (but not, of course, the same as) Project Bloks will be better.
Hell, we already do this today for ourselves. How many people get into the code-behind on GUIs regularly? Do you detail in code "button x will be placed to the left of button y, the center point between them will be ...". No, we often use some combination of markup language (XML-based like XAML, or something else) or visual designer (that may be generating a markup language version behind the scenes).
Then we connect the dots, the various objects to various actions or data sources, and off we go.
Just like 80% of my (early career) programming was really just gluing together a bunch of data sources for generating reports, much of what businesses need is in the same vein. Relatively (compared to the scale professional programmers like to think of our own work) trivial applications, that exist at a relatively high level (they're not writing a new DB server), connecting pieces together based off logical rules.
I mostly use the keyboard and mouse. There are some places where the mouse is better than the keyboard. I was playing online chess today, and I like to drag and drop the pieces. It feels more natural and not that much slower than inputting the coordinates.
But when I was coding today, I needed to navigate through my code quickly. The mouse would have been much slower than vim's CTRL-D, CTRL-U, and /search_keyword, so I used the keyboard.
For the non-professional programmers, Project Bloks might be more like chess's drag and drop. It's more natural and not that much slower for simple tasks. I can see why non-professional programmers may like it.
google isn't unaware, I'll try not to put words in his mouth, but a google exec said something along the lines that we aren't very far from needing half of the programmers/ IT people we have today
In one way, that's a scary idea (a lot of people will end up looking for work elsewhere). On the other, what programmer wants to do the stuff that can be automated away or done by a non-programmer? Or wants to reinvent the wheel because of NIH syndrome?
Almost all of them?
Still, so much of what we do these days is just tying together other people's libraries, connecting them together and maybe doing a bit of data conversion. My first step when I need to do something is to find out if someone else already wrote the software. Then I can just install+configure+move on to more interesting things.
Where I disagree is that "removing the code" will help someone gain better understanding. It might help them dip their feet in and get at the core of what's important (hence MIT using scheme for its intro CS class for 30 years). However as soon as someone passes the beginner phase, the difficult thing is expressing the ideas succinctly and unambiguously. That's exactly what programming languages do.
A good analogy might be mathematics notation. You can explain basic math without any notation, but as soon as you get to more complex stuff you need the notation to help you reason about it and encapsulate the ideas succinctly. Similarly, graphical programming environments can do a ton of useful stuff (HyperCard is what got me into programming at the age of 10), but they will always always hit a wall (until true human-level AI anyway). The author definitely doesn't get that part.
There are many people who think that a visual language or some other abstraction will simplify the problem of coding. I really don't think so. While things like diagrams are great for helping people comprehend something, they are absolutely terrible for expressing something. Just look at how difficult it is to draw really good diagrams. Consider the fact that we have had cook books for hundreds of years, but almost none of them are described solely with diagrams. Words are how humans prefer to communicate.
I think we often fall into the same trap with programming languages or frameworks. We say, "Look how easy it is to do this trivial thing. It's 100 times easier to do trivial things with this framework than without it". We are completely blind to the fact that the framework makes it 100 times harder to do ordinary things and 1000 times harder to do complex things.
There's a POV from which code is the details needed to get something done, and the less, the better. In my life, the less visible the code task has become, the more power I've gained. A couple of examples:
When word processors stopped needing to be told stuff like /b at the beginning and end of words I wanted boldfaced, it got better. I found the whole WYSIWYG thing enormously helpful. The portion of time I devoted to typography was released for improving content.
LabView made it possible for me to assemble data acquisition and control systems with drag/drop icons and drawing connections instead of coding a PID module and then a gain module and then a Kalman filter function and ... you get the idea. Less code to write, more stuff done.
By analogy: Today, I turn a dial to make a fire to cook my dinner. I turn a valve to get water. I drive a car to go places. Yes, I've rubbed sticks together, I've winched a bucket up from a well, and I maintained a horse for mobility when I was a kid. I'm pleased and empowered by no longer needing those skills.
In the same way, I look forward to the disappearance of coding as a prerequisite to creation. I'm immensely grateful to the people whose coding is making that happen.
Only a very tiny portion of creative work requires actual programming, like demo scene programmers. Even video games and Pixar movies have far more artists then programmers. It's true that more and more programmers are required to extend and maintain the software, but the growth of the end-user base has far outpaced the programmers. The majority of programmers are implementing business logic of which they have minimal high-level creative input.
The things we can do with computers without code has only increased. Pontificating on how it would be better if we didn't have to write code is like someone who once used a circular saw pondering why can't artisanal wood carving also be done with simple straight-forward, easy-to-use tools instead of difficult-to-use hand tools. I mean its crazy how often we hear this refrain about coding as opposed to other professions. No one asks why can't we have a gadget to perform an appendectomy at home instead of paying a surgeon thousands of dollars, but for some reason people think that coding is somehow unnecessary magic which could be done away with by a bit of clever rethinking. But code is not some rube goldberg device designed to obfuscate and impress; code is a medium, like a blank canvas, or a sheet of typing paper, the only difference is it can control physical things. It is not one concrete thing with a specific purpose which can be optimized like a word processor, or a stove, or a faucet or a car. Less code doesn't mean a simpler world, it just means less of what code can do.
I supported the article's thesis, that fewer people will be coding in the future, and provided a couple of anecdata points from my experience. I don't think code is unnecessary magic to be done away with. It's essential magic that becomes invisible when done well, to everyone's benefit.
And to clarify, creative work isn't limited to the arts. The creative impulse is common and has multiple outlets. Engineering is every bit as creative as portraiture or sculpture or crafting LOTR on a ginormous graphics processor farm.
My observation is that as the need for coding has decreased due in large part to increased computational sophistication, it's gotten easier for a wider range of people to do contributive work.
Suppose you have something to say about climate change. If you need to model it, you have several global models you can run, without having to code FEA and planetary atmospheric physics from scratch.
Or pick an artistic field - I know a hand weaver who uses commercial software to visualize her designs before she heads off to her hand loom. She'll never code a simple if/then/else statement, but the (invisible to her) code in the app lets her do things she'd never have time or resources to try otherwise.
Even in your medical example - I'll guess that fewer than 2% of the surgeons who use a Da Vinci medical robot could do anything useful with the code that runs that system. And if learning to code the robot were a prerequisite to using it, it would be a failed product.
I like your thought of a device for home appendectomy. Why not, really? Ultrasound imaging, vital signs sensing, actuators for retractors, scalpels...and lots of invisible code to make it work well. Just the thing for clinics in parts of the world where there is appendicitis but no doctors.
Code may not be designed to obfuscate, but it does that to many who would otherwise be able to use computation to do something new and useful. I think the more sophisticated code becomes, the less it will be a critical skill for most people. Which is good. We'll be free to figure out the next important thing and work on making it trivial.
>This paper envisions an end-to-end program generation scenario using recurrent neural networks (RNNs): Users can express their intention in natural language; an RNN then automatically generates corresponding code in a characterby-by-character fashion. We demonstrate its feasibility through a case study and empirical analysis. To fully make such technique useful in practice, we also point out several cross-disciplinary challenges, including modeling user intention, providing datasets, improving model architectures, etc. Although much long-term research shall be addressed in this new field, we believe end-to-end program generation would become a reality in future decades, and we are looking forward to its practice.
Much of this isn't even useful for getting a task done, but mainly to keep the human in the loop as to how things can proceed… wasteful. I personally can't wait for prevalent brain computer interfaces. I don't think there is a need for computers to "understand" humans as far as it can observe the things we are optimizing for and do it better whatever way…
For me if I could choose between typing into keyboard on the seconds-hours timescale- latency in vs us timescales via other transmission channels, I'd pick the later every time, and twice on Sundays (which i guess is no surprise since I actually worked on such systems lol).
Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old.
Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something nasty. Doing that with voice commands in my opinion is significantly harder compared to what we have now.
We will have tools, accessible, easy tools; Arduinos and Pis of the future; sure. But it will not replace, nor eliminate or reduce the amount of code written.
I found a lot of ideas in this article to be pretty interesting: http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
(And even just looking at languages, Fortran 2008 is hardly recognizable as compared to FORTRAN IV)
You could have automations around that though. A lot of manual work could be replaced with little AI bots that do the work. And since this work is not really "creative", it could be done through AI.
I think something eventually will, though. My reasoning for this conclusion is simply that I don't believe a significantly larger percentage of people will learn to write production software than are able to do so now. At the same time the need for software in every sector continues to grow, leading to some varying levels of scarcity in programmers. That's a massive economic opportunity, and so people will continue to pound at that nut until it cracks.
But if we create an AI that can understand people well enough to know what those people want without clear instructions, yes, we will have placed us out of the job market, together with everybody else.
Blueprints don't change as much as software does. It's not generally interesting to diff, fork, reformat, or patch a blueprint.
It is not about how much more information can we convey, but how much less data must be expended to present a tractable model of reality to the human operator. Conveying more details is worse than useless, it results in informationi overload and cognitive stagnation.
Historically, the way it happened in computer programming is those tools are text based. This is as much about the early use of computers as clerical aids to process business data, and the early synergies between computation and linguistics. Maybe it can be done, but it will require millions of man hours to accomplish. And almost nobody wants to invest in doing so because of the cost of opportunity.
If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map.
Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.
But the drawing wasn't the source of stress, rather it was the project "specification" that he sweated. The issue was the spec was a legal, text-format document detailing the size of beams, type of wire, plumbing, fixtures, etc. He had to assure that beams were sufficient to support structure, electrical wiring was safe and up to code, etc. A mistake could expose the contractor and himself to legal liability if a component failed, so an accurate spec was a task he took seriously.
Of course the subject of program specifications is commonly discussed, though often doesn't have the same significance that my father experienced. I guess in most cases program crashes don't have the same impact that a roof caving in would entail. In situations where crashing can't be tolerated, the spec will mean a whole lot more.
Your info was relevant to the idea of that at some level of complexity it becomes necessary to use text vs. only graphic presentation. Maybe in construction that occurs when there are more than a few elevations to juggle, but you probably know much more about it than me.
I thoroughly hated LabView when I had to program in it, but it did convince me that a graphical programming language could work -- if only it refrained from doing the cking stupid things that LabView did (such as the strongly typed editor* that would automatically progate the any type error it found, but not your fixes).
In my current C++ work, I would dealy love a graphical tool that showed me where any given value came from, much like LabView does by its very nature.
That's funny. I came away with the opposite opinion. Text is much better at describing details and it's much easier to be consumed by various things: people, editors, analysis tools, web apps, test engines, code generators, code transformation tools, ... I could go on.
Languages like LabView never have a complete toolchain (Prove me wrong by posting a small piece of editable LabView in a reply to this HN comment). They work well as domain specific languages, but that's about it.
My understanding is linguistics research has pretty thoroughly debunked this idea.
Don't remember the experimental design (was a long time ago, sorry), but I believe a study showed Chinese readers basically translate the characters back into the sounds of spoken language in their heads, before any processing of meaning takes place. In other words, pictographic mnemonics may be helpful when first learning the characters, but play no role for a fluent reader.
I suspect a similar thing will be true with programming for a long time to come. Even if you try to replace keyboard characters with other icons, it will be just substituting one arbitrary association between symbols and meaning with another. (Which is basically what language boils down to, anyway.)
Based on these two sentences, I'm confident that you don't know the first thing about Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Yes, in that the tools are massively better. So is the hardware that it all runs on.
No, in that you still have to tell the computer precisely and unambiguously exactly what you want it to do, and how, mostly in text. The level of detail required today is somewhat less, due to better tools, but at a high level the work hasn't changed.
1) There's a massive reliance on reusable libraries these days. Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing, but it means people spend less time rewriting the "boring" stuff (for want a lazy description) and more time wring their program logic.
2) Most people are coding in languages and/or language features that are several abstractions higher than they were 50 years ago. Even putting aside web development - which is probably one of the widest used frameworks these days - modern languages and even modern standards of old languages have templates, complex object systems, and all sorts of other advanced features that a compiler needs to convert into a runtime stack. Comparatively very few people write code that directly maps as closely to hardware as they did 50 years ago.
3) And expanding on my former point, a great many languages these days compile to their own runtime environment (as per the de facto standard language compiler): Java, Javascript, Python, Scala, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc. You just couldn't do that on old hardware.
4) Multi-threaded / concurrency programming is also a big area people write code in that didn't exist 50 years ago. Whether that's writing POSIX threads in C, using runtime concurrency in languages like Go (goprocesses) which don't map directly to OS threads, or even clustering across multiple servers using whatever libraries you prefer for distributed processing, none of this was available in the 60s when servers were a monolithic commodity and CPUs were single core. Hence why time sharing on servers was expensive and why many programmers used write their code out by hand before giving it to operators to punch once computing times was allocated.
So while you're right that we still write statements instructing the computer, that's essentially the minimum you'd expect to do. Even in Star Trek with the voice operated computers, it's users are commanding the computer with a series of statements. One could argue that is a highly intuitive REPL environment which mostly fits your "you still have to tell the computer precisely and unambiguously exactly what you want it to do..." statement yet is worlds apart from the they we program today.
Expanding on your above quote, "mostly in text": even that is such a broad generalisation that it overlooks quite a few interesting edge cases that didn't exist 50 years ago:
1) web development with GUI based tools (I some people will argue that web development isn't "proper" programming, but it is one of the biggest areas in which people write computer code these days. So it can't really be ignored. And there are a lot of GUI tools that write a lot of that code for the developer / designer. Granted hand crafted code is almost always better, but fact remains they still exist.
2) GUI mock ups with application-orientated IDEs. I'm talking about Visual Basic, QtCreator, Android Studio, etc where you can mock up the design of the UI in the IDE using drawing tools rather than writing creating the UI objects manually in code.
3) GUI based programming languages (eg Scratch). Granted these are usually aimed as teaching languages, but they're still an interesting alternative to the "in text" style programming languages. There's also an esoteric language which you program with coloured pixels.
So your generalisation is accurate, but perhaps not fair given the number of exceptions
Lastly: "The level of detail required today is somewhat less, due to better tools, but at a high level the work hasn't changed.":
The problem with taking things to that high level is it then becomes comparable with any instruction-based field. For example, cook books have a list of required includes at the start of the "program", and then a procedural stack of instructions afterwards. Putting aside joke esoteric languages like "Chef", you wouldn't class cooking instructions as a programming language yet it precisely fits the high level description you gave.
I think as programming is a science, it pays to look at things a little more in-depth when comparing how things have changed rather than saying "to a lay-person the raw text dump of an non-compiled program looks broadly the same as it did 50 years ago". While it's true that things haven't changed significantly from a high level overview, things have moved on massively in every specific way.
Lastly, many will point out that languages like C and even Assembly (if you excuse the looser definition) are still used today, which is true. But equally punch cards et al was still in widespread use 50 years ago. So if we're going to compare the most "traditional" edge case of modern development now, then at least compare it to the oldest traditional edge case of development 50 years ago to keep the comparison far rather than comparing the newest of the old with the oldest of the new. And once you start comparing ANSI C to punch-inputted machine code, the differences between then and now become even more pronounced :P
Programming languages exist today because computers can't handle ambiguity and don't understand software design. In another 50 years, machines will be a lot smarter, more able to handle ambiguity, and better than people at designing workflows and catching potential errors. Like the horse, no doubt some people will still prefer to do things the old way, but there's a good chance this will be limited mostly to academic exercises.
All they're saying here is that the tools we have will progress a lot in the next 50 years. There are some obvious problems with the way we design software right now which are due to human limitations. The only way to fix those is to remove a lot of direct control from humans and give it to AI programmers. Manually writing JavaScript in 2066 will be like manually carving arrowheads today: still effective but not something you would do for a serious purpose.
In 50 years, 99%+ of all the work ever done by civilization will be done after 2016.
> we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor.
I disagree. Maybe you know, but I haven't seen any indication of the sort.
http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf
There has already been some significant progress on this front. E.g., SQL and logic programming let you describe what you want to happen, and let the computer figure out some of the details. Any compiler worth using does this, too. Smarter machines and smarter programs will mean smarter programming languages.
Creating clear and accurate design documents is so much harder and more specialized a skill than programming that many places that do programming either avoid it entirely or make a pro-forma gesture (often after-the-fact) in its direction.
(I am only about half-kidding on the reasoning, and not at all about the effect.)
This is exactly what programmers do today. We just call the "design document" a "program".
Over time, our design documents become higher and higher level, with the programmer having to specify fewer details and leaving more of the work of sorting out the actual details to the computer.
Yeah and it took "us" 60 years from discovering flight to landing a rocket on the moon. Took "us" 60 years from the first computer to globally-live video streaming in your pocket. Time is a pointless metric when it comes to technology. You don't know what someone is cooking up down in some basement somewhere that will be released tomorrow and shatter your concept of reality.
Be really hard to identify, though.
Speaking as someone who has studied cuneiform and Akkadian, I would say that this claim isn't true. Here's a vowel that predates the period that you mentioned[0].
Where did you get this idea? Babylonian writing fully indicated the vowels. It always has. You're thinking of Egyptian / Hebrew / Arabic writing.
Even where a semitic language was written in cuneiform, vowels were always indicated, because the cuneiform system didn't offer you the option to leave them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Vowels
(Old Persian was written in repurposed cuneiform, and therefore could have omitted the vowels, but didn't.)
And that computing horsepower mostly goes towards fuel efficiency and safety. Which is nice, but almost certainly not the kind of progress people in the 1960's thought we'd make in automobiles over 50+ years.
> traditional pilots being essentially babysitters for autopilot systems
The first autopilot takeoff/cruise/landing happened in 1947.
> hyperloop designs
But we don't have hyperloops.
> I'd say those are much bigger changes than 1936-1986.
By 1986 we had fully-digital fly-by-wire aircraft. Our big achievement since then has been about a 20% improvement in fuel efficiency.
To bring your comparison closer to the subject at hand, this article has nothing to do with the design of computers themselves. We could use the same basic Von Neumann architecture in 50 years and still get rid of traditional programming languages as a primary method of designing software, just like we use the same basic engine designs from 50 years ago but use entirely different methods of designing and controlling them now.
Take an engineer designing a jet in 1966 and put them with a 2016 team. They will have to learn an entirely different workflow. Now computers are heavily involved in the design process and most of what was done manually by engineers is now written into software. The same situation will happen 50 years from now for people who design software.
Take an extreme example like game creation. In 1966, you could make a computer game, but you were doing manual calculations and using punch cards. Now you download Unity and almost everything but the art design and game logic is done for you. Game design moved quickly toward these kinds of automated systems because they tend to have highly reusable parts and rely mostly on art and story for what separates them from the competition. But there's no reason why this same concept wouldn't apply to tools used for any kind of program.
The horse to car comparison was only meant to show that the development of a technology in the first 50 years (or any arbitrary number) will not necessarily look like the next 50 years. Well-established tools quickly fall out of use when a disruptive technology has reached maturity, even if that tool has been used for thousands of years. Right now, software design is difficult, buggy, and causes constant failures and frustrations. Once we have established and recorded best practices that can be automated instead of manually remaking them every time, there will be no need for manual coding in traditional programming languages. Machines are getting much better at understanding intent, and this will be built into all software design.
Send them to the "PCs for seniors" course at the local library to learn the basics of clicking around on a computer. Then a one or two week training course on whatever software is used to design planes these days.
Getting up to date on modern "workflow" is not going to be a major hurdle for someone smart enough to design a jet. Heck, it's very likely there could be someone who started designed jets in 1966 and still designs them today. (Post retirement consultancy.)
Yes, Unity helps to visually organize your game's data, and there are built in and downloadable components (which are all created by coders) that can be used to plug into your game, but it's just another set of abstractions. Most of the time you will be writing your own components in a traditional coding language or delving into other's component code to adapt it to actually make your game function. There ARE game creation systems intended for no coding required, but they come with the expected limitations of visual coding that people are bringing up in this thread. No, Unity doesn't really fall into this category, barring a few limited game domains.
Perhaps in 50 years every domain will be "mapped" in this way, with predefined components that work with each other and can be tweaked as needed, but I don't see how that could eliminate coding, or even displace it that much. Two reasons I think coding is here to stay:
1) Any sufficiently complex system needs it's organization to be managed. At a certain complexity, whatever system is replacing coding will become something that looks a lot like coding. At that level of complexity, text is easier to manage than a visual metaphor. 2) Most pieces of software need custom components, even if only to stand out. Those game creation systems with no coding? No one is impressed by the games that are created in those systems. Not because the system cannot produce something worthwhile - but because with everything looking the same, the value of that output drops substantially.
I think coding will only go away when programming does. When the computer is as intelligent and creative as we are. And that's a point which I do not want think about too much.
This like the shift in transportation. A lot of people love driving and mistrust autonomous vehicles. But the tech is almost to the point where it's safer than human drivers. In most situations, it already is.
Another comparison would be SaaS. For a lot of companies, it's about risk mitigation. Moving responsibilities away from internal staff makes business sense in many cases.
This is a criticism of the idea that we need to make coding a basic life skill that everyone should focus on. It looks a lot like denial to some people.
Let's go back to transportation. Imagine if people were pushing the idea that commercial driving needs to be in every high school because driving was such a big employment area. Some people might say that the autonomous vehicles look like a big threat to job prospects, so maybe it's not such a good idea to focus on those particular skills.
Coding is great, provides a lot of opportunities to the people that it attracts, but it's a pretty specialized skill that's going to be increasingly displaced by more natural and automatic interfaces this century in all likelihood.
Cars now go 100,000 miles between tune-ups. They used to go, what? 10,000 miles?
Cars are much safer in collisions than they used to be.
Most cars now have air conditioners. I've driven in a car without AC in Arizona in July; believe me, AC can be a really big deal.
Most cars now have automatic transmissions, power steering, and power brakes.
And cars get much better fuel economy.
Driving from NYC to LA takes less time due to interstates and higher road speeds (and cars that can comfortably handle those speeds). Not half the time, but still a significant improvement.
And yet, most cars are not dramatically different as far as the experience of driving them is concerned. Nothing in the last 50 years looks revolutionary. It's been an accumulation of improvements, but there has been no game changer.
I suspect that the next 50 years in computing will be similar.
I'm curious what your definition of tune-up is, because I don't believe there exists a car that can go that far unmaintained without doing lasting damage to various systems.
After a quick Google, my impression is that most 2016 cars have a first maintenance schedule around 5k-6k miles. Some as low as 3,750.
For even lower maintenance look at electric cars. I think Tesla has very very low maintenance requirements for the first years.
It's not.
I have a couple of 60s Mustangs and several newer cars. My original '65 needs ignition service (what most people call a "tune up") every couple of years (of very modest usage). My '66, converted to electronic ignition, gets about twice as long (and 10x as many miles) before needing ignition service. They both end up fouling plugs because of the terrible mixture control and distribution inherent in their carbureted designs.
My wife's 2005 Honda CR-V gets about 100K to a set of plugs. (Fuel injection, closed loop mixture control, and electronic ignition are the key enhancements that enable this long a time between tune-ups.)
My diesel Mercedes and Nissan LEAF obviously never get tune ups.
You don't do valve adjustments on the Mercedes?
About the only thing I've done abnormal on the car in 7 years is replace two glow plugs. (And when the second one went, I actually replaced the 5 that hadn't been changed yet, since they are cheap and I didn't want to take the manifold off again to change #3...)
This is particularly true, e.g., of How to Design Programs [0].
You can't beat written word. Corps are not lining up to rewrite their bylaws in a bunch of connected drag-and-droppable blocks. I really don't think it's just inertia, the preciseness, versatility,and ease of examination and editing, and permanence of written language is hard to beat. Same with source code.
1) road signs, which are predominantly graphic based
2) public information signs. Eg no smoking. Also usually picture based albeit does often contain text instruction as well
3) beach flags indicating where to swim etc.
All of these are enforcing by-laws yet none specifically text driven. In fact when conveying simple rules to people, it often makes more sense to explain that in meaningful images as that enables anyone to understand the message, even if one doesn't understand the written language (eg tourists).
However, the original specification, which in the case of the signs are laws and for software is code, is text, not in visuals. There in lies the difference. I think visual aids like dependency graphs will help us visualize code and communicate ideas like in the signs you mention, but due to the reasons I mentioned previously text will still be the preferred method for specification, or in software engineering, programming. For example, visuals only go so far. The best visual specifications I can think of are blueprints, which I'd argue still require a little of reading to understand. But in certain domains, as I said, text is a better medium.
50 years ago, it might be conceivable to build auto scaling website that does something like pinterest within a decade, which now can be built in hours.
I'm not just talking about scaffolding and api usage either, so much has changed in coding in the last 15 or so years as well. think object oriented programming, interfaces, and GIT, and other new / useful practices.
the way we store our data is different as well. I believe it was the 70s, but during that time people needed convincing storing data in relational databases was a good thing.
today even that is changing
That's not true and even Sussman acknowledges this:
"The fundamental difference is that programming today is all about doing science on the parts you have to work with. That means looking at reams and reams of man pages and determining that POSIX does this thing, but Windows does this other thing, and patching together the disparate parts to make a usable whole.
Beyond that, the world is messier in general. There’s massive amounts of data floating around, and the kinds of problems that we’re trying to solve are much sloppier, and the solutions a lot less discrete than they used to be."
Natural language sucks, it is amibigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and have too many non-functional degrees of freedom. After all, that's why mathematics left natural language and adopted the mathematical syntax we have today.
Diagrams suck, they are ambigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and has too many non-functional degrees of freedom. That's why cook books don't have diagrams to describe recipies.
The syntax will never die, it is the only sensible we have to define programs.
And yet anytime two or more programmers get together to talk about what they are creating, they start drawing diagrams on whiteboards.
I'm not saying diagrams are useless, they just make a poor substitute for syntax.
The flowchart and decision tree exist for a reason to describe algorithms.
As long as it is very simple. Electronics already have a highly developed visual language for describing their functions - but if what was going on inside every chip was illustrated just as what was going on between chips, it would be entirely unintelligible. Instead, any visual representation is at a particular scale, and well known portions are represented as blocks with cryptic textual notes next to each interface (ACK, EN, V0+, CLK, PT2, HVSD, WTFBBQ, etc.), labels to identify company or type, and an expectation that you know what they do or can find out on your own (and not an expectation that you understand how they do it.)
Anything simple enough to be completely expressed in human-comprehensible pictures should be exposed to the user and modifiable (even if not by using pictures, but forms.) I totally agree, if that's what you and this article are trying to say. My experiences in trying to encode actual human workflows in BPMN have taught me that when using pictures it's harder to express things of any sophistication than in words - because of words like "with" and "each" and "all", "if" and "when," and because of ways things change over time, and because of separate but overlapping/interacting flows that languages can express easily but pictures not so much.
In pictures, that involves looking all over your picture for different things, trying to figure out how to draw lines to them; if the condition is once or twice removed from the object of the search, it involves trying to untangle massive knots with your eyes and memory. Theoretically, that is. What it involves in practice is scrawling words all over your picture (just like in a circuit diagram.) Words that express the same types of relationships over time and type as the picture is trying to express projected onto a plane, words that could be easily expanded to include those relationships and eliminate the 18 types of lines, the 25 types of shapes, the 12 types of shape borders, the 16 color schemes and the long list of rules for connecting them that had to be invented to avoid coming up with a textual syntax.
Going back to electronics, I don't think anyone would argue that schematic block diagrams are inferior to reading the raw netlist. Similarly, I feel programming could be improved if IDEs for popular langauges would allow connecting functions together in a streaming manner. Of course, I am aware this exists, Simulink, LabView, FPGA schematic workflow, but these are niche languages that I don't work in.
Well, no, but some may well argue that reading the HDL is better then a diagram. I have experience working with both the HDL and schematic in the FPGA world, and in my estimation text-based HDL is way better than working with a diagram.
Of course, YMMV, my brain may just be more optimized for processing text instead of images.
That should be a great fit for a textual HDL instead of labouring through a schematics mainly linking pins to pins again and again. It would even be much more expressive, now that we often have chips so big that they cannot be represented efficiently as a single symbol on a single sheet but are split in smaller blocks looking like HDL ports without the flexibility; now that µC, SoC and other kinds of chips have pins that are so much muxed out that they don't have a clear, expressible function, meaning that grouping them in blocks is more of random choice than a good solution. And this multiplexing means that you'll often have to change and change again the connections of your wires in the schematic, and that would be much easier to do with an HDL.
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That's why my mind was blown when a software job forced me to use a graphical tool like Scade. It felt like coming 20 years backwards, when in electronics HDL were not popular yet and we had to design FPGAs and such with schematics. And that was even worse, because the graphical representation looks parallel, concurrent, as a electronic schematic does, except that it doesn't match anything on the software side: first the specification/design document you have to implement is generally sequential, not concurrent, and then the generated code and the way the CPU/computer works are sequential as well, not concurrent. So you have this weird looking graphical part in the middle, which looks parallel but isn't really, and messes with your brain because you have to perpetually translate between the sequential specification to it, and from it to what it really does sequentially.
An appaling moment to do this job and discover that they considered it an improvement on C/Ada/whatever regular programming. And I didn't mention the tooling; like when what could have been a simple textual diff turns into an epic nightmare you are never sure you can trust the result, if you manage to get a result.
I've done this. It doesn't work. You need more details than can be cleanly represented on a diagram. How do you do namespacing for example? Which database schema will that box connect to? How will it reconnect?
All 'visual programming languages' fall back to text boxes constantly. Inevitably the contents of those text boxes are needed to understand or execute the visual representation of the program.
We've had that for over twenty years.
My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.
Visual Studio and many others have this out of the box but there's plenty of companies that do well selling exactly this like telerik.
I personally don't and been doing it the "hard way" since the beginning because it feels less confining. And I don't want to rely on an IDE to build something. Plus the code it generates was always kind of kludgy.
Perhaps, in part, because one allows for a greater expressiveness -- albeit with a little more planning and cognitive load.
Visual editors don't work so well with pages where parts are static & parts are dynamically generated. (Like, a css class may be different based on the data that it's showing). And at this point, pretty much every page in a web app has dynamic parts.
Turn the color of button3 in pane4 red
pane4.button3.color = 'red'
#pane4 #button3 { color:red;}
I think python strikes a good balance, naturalish language whenever possible, without forcing it into places where it doesn't fit. At least that's the feel I got from it.
I just showed it to my girlfriend who is learning Python. Her comment was "hmm but is this really easier than learning to code"? Well, it probably IS a lot easier, as long as your app fits within the constraints of what Bubble can do.
The problem with such tools is always that you very quickly hit the limits of what they can do, and then you're stuck. You can't easily peel back the abstraction and go deeper. You end up having to scrap the project or just give up on certain things. Bubble's "language" can't do looping, for instance. You can apparently write snippets of Javascript to do other stuff, but then you're back to needing to learn programming again.
Cobol had that idea, and Applescript took it farther. For example:
tell application "Safari" to activate
"Looking like a natural language" doesn't make the language easier to use, at least until we have AI compilers.
We're not, really, but given the pervasiveness of computing technology we're recognizing that it's important for children to have some formal experience with software design concepts regardless of which career path they choose.
I'm a firm believer that at least some coding ability is beneficial in any profession. It's like writing, or vocabulary; you don't "need" it for some professions, per se, but being a good writer enhances both your professional and personal life in many ways, so it's worthwhile to teach. It's much the same with coding.
An administrative assistant who can write scripts to collate and email weekly reports to their boss is far more valuable than one who spends four hours a week combing through excel spreadsheets.
A visual artist who can write their own plugins for Blender/Maya/Photoshop/etc will be much more flexible and productive than one who performs the same 2-minute-long string of commands hundreds of times a day.
A machinist who can quickly design a part in Solidworks and send it to a CNC mill or lathe will be able to serve a wider range of customer needs than one who outsources that design work or crafts the part by hand.
And so on. Why is there so much hostility to the idea of teaching children some basic programming skills at an early age?
Doing programming in plain English would be just as cumbersome as doing math in plain English.
I don't think anyone can quite fully imagine the nightmare of trying to program in a recursively enumerable language[1].
In Utupia (aka Nowhere) we will have programs that a human being can know is correct. This might involve mathematical proofs, tests and whatever. But how do we know that those things are correct?
In some cases, it would help if we had an English text explaining what the program should doo + computer verification that the program really does that. The English text is only one part of the picture -- but an important part.
This is what acceptance testing tools like Cucumber and Robot try to do; but they avoid actually parsing English. Computers are getting better at parsing human languages, so I expect improvement in this field.
Modern models learn to achieve goals in increasingly sophisticated 3d environments and even learn execute commands in some very limited form of natural language. You could say that the question of achieving more humanlike performance may be "just" a question of engineering and scale.
So the question of whether these kids will be coders as they grow up really doesn't seem to be that important of a question -- they are being taught how to succeed at whatever they try. I'm excited to see these types of programs move forward and become prevalent throughout our educational system.
I've been seeing this same thing happen with my 7 year old son (I'm a programmer), and I always encourage him to find out why something didn't work out the way he expected it to.
Whether they grow up to become a coder or not, I'll be happy when more people look for the cause of the problem, rather than just simply treating the symptoms.
Without much thinking pretty much encapsulates what Word did to presentation standards, at least in my experience. Let us never forget WordArt.
Part of me always wants to make the argument that these things are difficult, not just because of an abstract syntax and arcane rules, but because these things are genuinely difficult to reason about - attempts to make difficult things easier by papering over the cracks results in a lot of pain for a lot of people. Bits ping off and people are left unable to even begin to solve the problem.
However the very, very, obvious flipside of this is that lowering barriers to entry is pretty much always a good thing. It invites unconventional perspectives and novel approaches - how could that be a bad thing? Sure, some people will make crappy things that shouldn't have ever existed but by the same token some people will make great things that never would have been without the lowered barriers.
The future is most professionals writing code as part of their job, just as the present is most professionals writing as part of their job.
But is: "For every button on the page that is a "warning" button, replace the background color to red."
Necessarily better than? $("button.warning").css("background-color", "red")
But think for a beginner:
What is $ ? Is it money?
What are () for?
What is CSS?
I want to shade it, so lets do background-shade .. oh, color only works, so you have to know all the terms.
Can I do "background-color" "red blue white striped"
What is button.warning? Can I do button.border ?
These are all questions a newbie could ask - because they have no experience in the "domain language"
If we had a real natural language based programming language it would have all the problems of law. Laws are written in a very formal style that takes a lot of training to understand, and despite this they contain enough ambiguity to support a whole industry of lawyers arguing about them. Making programming similar to law would not make anything easier.
I tried to get into Inform 7, but the natural language syntax was so fuzzy, I was constantly trying to figure out how things worked and how I had to write things down to get the results I was trying to get.
EDIT: Since guess-the-verb was sometimes half the battle with old Infocom games, I suppose its ironically fitting that the experience of writing IF with Inform 7 parallels that experience.
Granted a smart phone was unheard of at this point so most mobile apps wouldn't even be called apps by today's standards.
A decade and a half later and mobile developer is a highly skilled _coding_ position.
UML in later versions got so bad that even the original creators disowned it. Turned out that putting everything into a diagram was just as hard (and less convenient) than writing it as code.
Someone is going to have to right the code so that the end-user can just click buttons. So if this future of programmatic interfaces is coming, it's going to require more people writing code to build it— not fewer!
I don't think the author or the person interviewed has used Visual Basic, or understands why a developer might not want that.
Programming is definitely going to get easier and I don't doubt that it will become a common skill.
I just doubt this idea that professional programming is a dying art or something. It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.
(Also, I am like 75% sure that it was a sponsored article to advertise for the company named in the article)
> It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.
Is actually due to Labor Supply vs. Labor Demand. I can envision a world where majority of jobs are all replaced by machines (from Baristas to Accountants), and web/software development (among other fields, such as specialized medicine) are some of the last places for people to remain self-sufficient off their own labor. With this over-abundance of supply, employers are capable of being extremely discretionary over their hires, and are able to pay just enough for their human capital to sustain themselves.
I think the problem with that assumption is that there has been virtually no traction on "just telling the computer what to do" - whether text or voice. There is also the assumption that programming is not getting more difficult. While not everyone is working on "capital E" engineering efforts, it's a bit ridiculous to think that our jobs are getting easier to automate in the wake of Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and projects like Web Assembly pushing browser-based development into interesting, new places.
Just because we made it easy to set up a blog doesn't mean we made it easy to "program with words".
In the 1980s, there was a consensus that "software components" enabled by object orientation were a pipe dream.
They were so long as you were using C++ which was barely binary compatible and where you couldn't reuse objects in a .so file without also having an .h file. It was awful, not at all a minimal viable product.
Then Java came along and a number of other languages that adopted essentially the same model for OO programming such as Python, PHP, Ruby, C#, etc.
Now you can cut and paste a few lines of XML into Maven and woohoo... You've incorporated a software component into your system.
People bitch that it has to be XML, but the sheer ease of doing so means it is not hard at all to get 100+ dependencies in a project and now the problem is dealing with the problems that come when you have 100+ dependencies.
(And of course the same is true with npm and every other language that has similar tools.)
Two big themes are: (i) tools that reduce the essential difficulty of software development and (ii) antiprofessionalism in software engineering.
Compilers like FORTRAN mean you don't need to have the intimacy with the machine you need to write, say, Macro Assembler. That is mainstream, but other technologies, such as logic programming and rules engine are still stillborn. In theory tools like that mean the order of execution does not matter so much so you don't need the skill to figure out what order to put the instructions in. Practically they are yet to become vernacular tools that are palatable to programmers and non-programmers. (Anything programmers can't stand will be 10x more painful to non-programmers, I can tell you that!)
Anti-professionalism is another big theme. Had computers come around 20 years earlier we would probably have a programmer's union, licensing and other things that would make a big difference in our lives. As it is, the beef that programmers have is not that we don't get paid enough, it is that we are often forced into malpractice by management.
The irony is that the future probably will enable individual programmers to have an even more outsized ability to create value, and fewer programmers will be necessary to accomplish the same set of tasks. Sadly, cogent arguments about meaningful issues aren't exactly TechCrunch's forte.
The only graphical language that I've encountered professionally is LabVIEW, and I've yet to see an instance/programming style where it has been superior for anything but quick prototyping.
A language that's editable in both flowchart and traditional formats could be very useful, if executed in a way that doesn't cripple the traditional side of things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_%28programming_languag...
I find myself craving it even 15 years later.
I haven't seen any kind of visual coding environment that didn't fall apart quickly once you got to more complex scenarios.
If such a future is possible, that would be great. I would be all for it. But the people who are already in the field, working in the trenches, don't think it's a realistic vision for the near future. All attempts thus far to produce "layman friendly programming" have been either failures, or relegated to non-functional toys. Hence why we don't want to waste our scarce time and resources on such moonshots.
If the author and his peers disagree, they are free to found/invest in such ventures. And if they're right, they can make a fortune for themselves in the process. But just sitting in the sidelines and armchair quarterbacking is a pointless waste of time for everyone involved.
But I guess the main point of the article was not that, but the Bubble plug.
Contracts are written down in text, so they can be edited, carefully read and referred to later.
He might as well also say, that in the future there will be no written contracts, we'll go back to debating and settling our issues verbally in public.
This is a great metaphor. Only I would change that he thinks we should "go back" with he thinks we are going to invent a magical technology that lets lawyers from two companies drag and drop a few images together and BOOM there's a legally binding contract.
Remember when you could write HTML with a WYSIWYG editor?
Most sites can be built with Wordpress.
The hosting side of things is mostly automated and becoming more standardized.
These days, when I look for a programming language, it's not about the syntax sugar, it's more about the feature set that comes with the language: things like the module and build system (e.g. Java is pretty easy), the ease at which both complex and trivial tasks can be accomplished, and the availability of support community and libraries.
It is the same reason despite all the training in mathematics only a few people go on to get a PhD and come up with something novel in mathematics. The rest of the population gets by with basic algebra, not even calculus is required.
My view is less that programming is going away, and more that all jobs are. Not immediately or anything, but I don't think we are going to magically produce programming jobs for all the masses who are going to need a job.
Having been at this over 15 years I have single handedly automated thousands of jobs, and of those a healthy handful are making things more efficient that a project needs less programmers, etc..
So while we will still need programmers probably forever , I'm not sure why people think that the number of programming jobs will do anything but stay the same or decrease, while the number of candidates increases.
Tooling has come so far, and it's going to go farther. You don't need to know a lot to make something meaningful anymore.
How we expect to train all children to be programmers and think that by the time they are our age it will still be a field that is lucrative is silly I think. My prediction is with all the new programmers coming into the field intersecting with the tooling getting better, intersecting with that a lot of other markets need less people I think we are left with a crowded field of players where the average skill level is lower because the tasks do not require it to be all that high any more.
Programming is the new carpentry. Probably jobs for a long time , but training the children now like it's going to be the most amazing career path is short sighted I think.
Considering this, I hope my kids don't pick programming as a career. I would love to be wrong.
Train your children to think. Give them the freedom to change career paths if necessary.
I hold the same opinion as you. I think that new languages and tooling will empower people to do more with less while being easier to learn. Combine this with globalization plus stagnating economies and the outlook of programming as a career seems less lucrative.
Correction: Most people do it without thinking. This does not mean the majority of the typography on the internet (and eventually printed) is good or well done.
My LaTeX setup produces fairly good typography for math work, without too much thinking on my part, after setting up the packages, fonts, etc and learning LaTeX, which did took some time. (And ironically enough, writing LaTeX feels quite a bit like coding...) But first of all, deciding to use and learn LaTeX (or some other workable solution to produce good typography, it probably isn't the only one but the one I'm familiar with) requires you think about typography and realize that good typography is needed in the first place.
Matter of fact, once I got past the point where the novelty of writing lots of code wore off, I'm spending most of my time trying to write less code.
That side step all these miracle solutions for bringing coding to the masses in one fell swoop and eliminating its tedium do is that "Hey, technically, if you draw pictures instead, it doesn't count as writing". Yes, technically true, totally useless. I personally believe that whoever comes up with this again and again deserves to be bludgeoned by a copy of "K&R The C Programming language", turned into a picture book. All 70,000 pages of of it, with the big glossy full-page, double-page foldout prints.
/rant
I don't think the author understands the purpose of the project. Google wants more coders. As a company Coders are likely one of Google's largest expense (At my Job staffing is 25% developers, and staffing is ~80% of our current budget). Does Google necessarily need more developers writing code? No, however they could use more people who can code to solve the small problems they face daily.
I think it's more likely we'll have people writing code informally, and as a small part of their overall job.
>Writing code will become less and less necessary, making software development more accessible to everyone.
I agree with that sentiment, however I fail to see the link between more accessible development and fewer people writing code. This process has been happening for years.
>The real benefit of something like Project Bloks is that it actually removes the code.
But is that new? What if something more advanced is needed?
Excel is a good example of writing code for a job. Access is an example of programming without writing code (it's sql with a GUI). Both tools are popular however people have a hard time doing advanced things. This is also perhaps due to the high price of creating the building block interface/software cost.
By thinking logically, people may not write code formally, they may not write any code: however it will encourage people to create solutions to the problems most applicable to them. Maybe their solution is 90% the blocks provided by their program. 10% code they wrote so handle their edge case. Perhaps it's something they only engage in one day a month.
In the end I think we'll see more code, more people writing code, and programs with more handling of the common tasks as building blocks but the ability to write code for the complex parts and plug it in where needed.
The problem with programming is that computers can't understand your intention. What amateur programmers need is side-effect free functions, efficient abstracting away of cores and memory-management, and static analysis that makes functional bugs as obvious as a leak in a plastic bag. Computers will never understand your intention; programmers barely understand your intention and they have a lot more in common with you.
The reason we'll write less code in the future is we won't need as many programs. The future is in machine learning and machine teaching, which enable a single program to perform a huge variety of different tasks. We'll train the computers of the future by showing examples and correcting mistakes, as we do with our fellow humans. Machine teaching is a different thing entirely from programming.
"creating new ways to teach computational thinking to kids."
Pretty disingenuous or arrogant to act like you're setting Google straight xD.
Also, "intersectionality."
In my opinion, the ability to think laterally is far more valuable than the ability to think 'computationally'. The latter is comprised of essentially one pattern of thinking -- procedural -- while the former opens one to an infinite set of patterns with which to think.
The computer is a decent vehicle for exploring patterns or modes of thinking once you've discovered them, but the goal should be to explore the pattern, not the vehicle.
I heard that same argument 30 years ago. "4G" and "expert systems" and "application generators" and "visual programming" were going to do away with the "engineering" aspect of software engineering.
However, in reality, we write more complex code for a simple business app now than ever before.
Once hard AI can extract requirements and transform them to systems, we can retire from coding, but probably not before then.
It alludes to computer science, but really it just boils down to solving problems by breaking them into parts. In other words, problem solving skills. It doesn't sound like anything special to me.
In that context, I do think early encounters with programming might be a great entry point to "computational thinking" for some who aren't well served by existing curricula. It certainly makes more sense to me than trying to train every child to write code for its own sake.
For the same reason we groom children to become mathematicians, scientists, readers, writers, historians, musicians, actors, etc. before middle school. Project Bloks grooms your child to be a Software Developer about as much as their first grade teacher grooms them to be a Quantitative Analyst.
At the same time, many other programming opportunities opened up. We have code in every single doorknob (at least, a lot of them). Some coding usages will be replaced, but others will always open up, at least for the forseeable future.
Editado: conclusion, programming is becoming harder, not easier.
So true. I'm not sure why, it shouldn't be that way.
There is always a lower and higher power, even if they are equal in design.
The issue with "computational thinking" in so far as how this article seems to want to teach it and how most schools often do teach it already in the real world is the tendency to stop at the basics and Office applications and just enough VBA/macros to give people a feeling of competency without giving them a glimpse into the real depths of programming and what software developers really do.
I keep wanting to make a XKCD-style sketch graph of the idea. But there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger over-competent business people that thinks all the software they need to run their business is spreadsheets and spreadsheets pretending to be databases like Access. To them real software developers seem over-paid based on their experience of Lovecraftian "systems" they can hack together given what they think they know.
That's a very real and dangerous place for business people to be, but it is unsurprisingly common. Those people don't respect programming as a discipline and a craft, and sometimes those are the people out in the corporate world controlling software developer salaries or morale...
It's also the same lack of knowledge about software as a craft (as engineering, in a very classical sense) that leads people time and time again to the well of "well in the future people won't be coding because [ Excel will do it all | There will be a visual tool everyone will easily understand | AI will do all the programming based on natural language queries | Insert some other magic idea here ]".
There's as much art to software development as there is science, and forgetting that art will still need artists and will not make itself is a strange thing that is surprising common.
To be fair, there are a lot of software developers themselves that have played into this delusion, and it's something of a trap that a software developer can easily fall into. We're trained to break down systems and try to automate them to their fullest potential and it's hard sometimes to avoid that meta-leap to wanting to do it to our own systems. We fall into building "Business Rules Engines" that we think some business users might be able to understand and comprehend and might obfuscate away the need for programming. We experiment with boondoggles like visual programming languages and "auto-coding" experiences. We get grandiose visions of the machine or software product or great AI that will make it all more accessible...
The future will probably look like the present in that regard. We'll still have the Dunning-Kruger folks building mission critical applications out of complex webs of Excel and Access and other past and future productivity tools we build in the goal of making programming more accessible. We'll still have software developers eventually hired to clean up the messes and craft versions that can sustainably last or reliably operate outside the hacked together environment from which they were originally built. There will continue to be software developers continuing to think they can build the environment that will done rule them all and save everyone time (and meanwhile eat up so much of software development budgets and time to built it)... And all of these groups will still have a hard time communicating between each other the real risks and efforts involved in any of it.
It could be the analyst that spends hours of drudgery printing out things from one system and retyping them into another (then going back to fix the typos) when what they want to be doing, what would enable them to provide value, is analyzing the output from the second system. It could be the junior exec that spends countless hours manually collating data to build spreadsheets and presentations about their projects, when they want to be doing is trying out new ideas and refining their projects.
Many people were raised to "write each vocabulary word 30 times" and see drudgery as a necessary, albeit frustrating, part of their jobs. Programmers automate that away so those people can do more important and useful things and produce more value. It's not just drudgery though. People have hard problems, often vaguely defined, and programmers help them understand, specify, clarify, and solve those problems.
Younger generations are more computer literate, but still often just use computers and don't realize how much control they could have over them. They may use programs that don't do quite what they need, not realizing how easy that would be to fix. Even if they're not the ones doing the programming, just recognizing that a programmer could help solve their problems is valuable.
At the same time, many non-programmers don't realize how hard some things are to program, or how clear, precise, and unambiguous things need to be defined in order for computers to produce the desired result. They assume something must be simple when they can't even define what the something is. Or they assume that because a program exists, any programmer could make an equivalent but slightly different program quickly and easily.
We don't need to teach everyone to code, we certainly don't need to teach everyone the syntax of some specific language. But we really do need to teach them to think in these terms. What problems do you face? Which of those could be automated or streamlined? How would you specify it clearly and unambiguously? What edge cases and special conditions do you need to deal with? etc. Given that line of thinking, those who are interested will learn to program and those who aren't will at least understand it. Some hypothetical pictocode/vocalcode/AIcode doesn't really matter. People need to understand the basic concepts of problem-solving and automation, how they can be useful, and what makes them relatively easy or difficult.