Industry Disrupted: Impact of Automation on Programming (2018)

> Currently, creating this time-and-money saving automation requires a corps of programmers to hand-type and hand-test the endless lines of underlying code

Automated testing wasn’t a rare new thing in 2018. And automating writing of code is...where we got languages higher level than handcoded raw machine code from.

The idea that automation was new to impacting programming in 2018 is launghable. Automation, though, while it chnages the nature of work, also tends to increase output of, and thus demand for, human work, until some other constraint is reached. Automating software development is why it waa different in 2018 than, say, 1955—and also why there is so much higher pay in the field.

I think this kind of misses the point that programming (done right) has been automating whatever is practical to automate from the start.

Whenever new capabilities opened up we've just used them to extend our reach.

How has the industry changed since 2018 when this blog article was written?