Building bridges is hard. But it's a lot easier now than it was five hundred years ago.
There's no general reason to think hard things can't get easier.
There's no general reason to think hard things can't get easier.
Specifying routines completely disambiguously will always be hard, but I do think techniques will come along to provide the equivalent of railings and safety nets while you do this; such as AI to query you about what you really want to happen, and to draw your attention to edge cases and unusual combinations of circumstances that you need to make a clear decision about.
Certainly true in many respects. However I don't think learning programming is much easier now than it was in the 80s.
Back then I had to bicycle to the library to borrow a book, and hope that the accompanying diskette with the compiler in it was still working.
Programming is still programming. Maybe becoming a professional software engineer is harder, though.
An abundance of choice can actually make things harder.
But overall it's so much easier these days. Even if you're spoiled for choice, you can get the tools and documentation for free. Back then it was either the BASIC interpreter that shipped with your computer (QBASIC for me) or the assembler (debug.com) or paying big bucks to buy a compiler. I was lucky that my dad could obtain a PASCAL and a C compiler through his work.
These days you might have too much choice but back then for a kid like me, the choice was what was available in the local library. So not much choice at all.
It was also what made demoscene competitions so interesting, there wasn't a web page explaining how to pull off those tricks.
It was curiosity and reading between the lines of those books that spiked out the curiosity to try out such tricks.
I wonder what else to call it. "Source code" is obvious and what everyone uses, but now I want something else to use.
Similarly not simply building the same old bridge, because who the hell wants bridge 1.0 I want warp-bridge 20.0 now, requires I have a mastery of basic Bridges and additional pioneering topics currently of interest of which few individuals are experts.
And similarly the explosive growth of the products of these make-a-game kits renders the skill almost entirely worthless. What would have been a very viable publishable product 25 years ago, is now considered shovelware. I think the only way this would end is if we somehow reached a skill cap in development (you've officially made the best bridge that's at all possible!), but if such a thing may exist we're certainly nowhere even remotely close to getting there.
I disagree. It's pretty easy to, say, find a suitable log, stand it up by the edge of a stream, and topple it over. It's more about the strength required than the thinking; and if it's a struggle, we have JCBs, chainsaws, etc. to help.
For something a little more robust, hire an AVLB. For more permanence, buy something like a Bailey or Medium Girder bridge.
Of course, I'm being facetious; but my point is that "programming" covers a vast spectrum. We don't teach kids to write under the expectation that they'll be modern day Shakespeares (or build Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridges); we do it because writing is incredibly useful, even if it's as mundane as a shopping list on the back of one's hand (or a log over a stream).