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i don't buy it.

haven't people been saying that since the 70s? even SQL was designed with the intent that accountants could use it. but programming is really hard, especially if you want something that's done well.

i've also yet to see any general purpose robots that can do anything useful. i still think it's a long way out, if at all possible. there are tons of considerations that go into just about anything and if there's no magic AI there's really no way to program every useful (nevermind adaptable) constraint into everything.

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I'm not sure "programming is hard" is the right counterargument - I personally find farming hard, and I'm sure most Westerners do too - but for millennia it's all people did to survive.

Also, have you seen what non-programmers can do with Excel? I'm often blown away by the technical skill demonstrated by people who don't see themselves as technical.

On robots, I suspect general purpose robots are not so popular for the same reasons that the industrial revolution didn't happen in Roman times - human labor is too inexpensive. Factory labor in China and other developing nations is much too adaptable and inexpensive for robots to be worthwhile. But that will change.

I agree with you that it's a pretty long way out!

It's definitely going to be sooner than later, though.

There's different kinds of hard.

Pushing a car three miles back to your house is hard. So is beating Kasparov at chess. But clearly they are two very different kinds of endeavor, and I forget how to unambiguously refer to the two types of effort.

And I don't just mean "mental" vs "physical" - I'd place learning a martial art closer to beating Kasparov than pushing a car home.

Sure - and from that perspective farming was a probably not a great example. But surely more people could be programmers than currently are.

Pushing a car is physically exhausting but doesn't require much training and practice. Programming requires training and practice, but I don't know that it requires more training and practice than, say, becoming a lawyer, doctor, martial artist, or other engineer. And the opportunities for practice come much earlier in programming training than lawyer or doctor training!

Though now that I think about it, farming involved more than just physically exhausting work - knowing what to plant, when, how to handle the soil, etc. - those all seem "hard" to me in a "training and practice" sense.

Yes, I would say anyone who thinks that farming is simple grunt labor has never seriously tried to grow food to feed any number of people.

Farming of course involves physically exhausting work, and yes, that's the easy part (at least from an economic standpoint.)

People can't even give unambiguous driving directions to other rational human beings, and we expect them to be able to instruct computers on what to do.

("Take a right at where the barn used to be", "Go until you see the house with a big tree in front of it, you'll know what I mean, it's pretty big", "Take a left at the dog")

The best example I ever heard of that was a friend of mine giving instructions on how to get to his OWN house, where he'd lived for at least 5 years. He didn't know the names of the streets around his house, and just told us to turn right after the "lighthouse mailbox".

For what it's worth, whenever I'm in that area, I always notice the lighthouse mailbox now.

This made me laugh out loud in the middle of a meeting (thanks), but it also raises a great point. In order to truly make programming accessible to everyone, I think you'd either need to train everyone to think like programmers (shudder), or you would need AI smart enough to decipher pretty ambiguous and logically incomplete code.

Yeah but programmers get up-close practice. If people gave instructions to people and got to 'debug' the results and did it over and over, they'd certainly get better at it. Not that everyone is well-cut-out to program (by my readings on theze internets), I'm just pointing out the weakness in your analogy.

I buy it.

I don't think we'll all be sitting down in front of a C compiler, but I think a lot of people will spend their days configuring software to do things that it is not pre-programmed to do, using logic that is in line with the programmer mindset.

I like to look to agriculture, because computers are becoming quite prevalent in the industry and is a good indication of where the technology is headed in all industries that have not been traditionally computer dominated. The modern tractors are doing a lot of automation that is programmed by the farmer, depending on their own requirements. Like: "When the tractor gets to this position in the field, raise the implement. Lower it when it gets to _this_ position." That is programming.

I do agree we are a long way off from having general purpose robots, but we already do have robots everywhere we look. These agricultural tractors I speak of are robots that are being programmed, not operated, by farmers. That is just one of many examples.

Yeah they've been saying it since the 70's:

"Everyone needs computer programming. It will be the way we speak to the servants."

-John McCarthy, creator of Lisp and coiner of the term Artifical Intelligence.

But I don't think the age of the claim is in itself a reason to not believe it.

The more you know about programming, the more you can do with general purpose devices when they arise, and more importantly, the more devices you can make into general purpose devices.

A simple recent example is Kinect. It isn't a general purpose device. It was a gaming doohickey. Thanks to programming, you can turn it into a (more!) general purpose device.

Hah, that's a great quote. :) Pithy and to the point.

One some level, we've already reached that point - though we're not programming directly to communicate with McCarthy's servants we are already on that path.

The "hardness" of programming is not a constant.

Over time, interfaces become more abstracted. Who could have imagined Ruby on Rails in 1980? jQuery in 1995? Further abstraction opens programming to a wider audience. Programming will become increasingly diverse as programmers cover an increasingly wide spectrum of technical expertise.

I guess we've all been programmers since we got our first VCR. But I think there is a real qualitative difference these days between someone who can write a program and someone who is actually quite good at doing so.

We commonly talk of a 10x difference in ability between programmers (and I won't go into the truth of that here) but it's not unreasonable to expect that the difference between the best and the worst programmers will widen by another order of magnitude in the future.

Really the argument is semantics. Technology (and software programmed by genuinely skilled programmers) is making it easier and easier for people who would otherwise be poor programmers to achieve a result - even if it is a strange sort of chimera cookie-cutter application that only sort of meets their needs. (This is what Microsoft does with software for the enterprise.)

We'll all become programmers in the sense that we're all now omniscient due to the introduction of mobile phones with web browsers built in and the availability of search results on tap through said web browsers.

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