Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

I think the piece is overly optimistic about the prospects of coding becoming common place. We have dealt with the software crisis since the inception of software and up till now, no one has proposed an even half way plausible plan on how to address it. As such until someone solve the software crisis in a measurable way that can improve the quality and predictability of code. It will remain a craft, as such only the most skilled craftsmen will be of real value, with the less skill providing solutions that are far more expensive to maintain.

As well the for the majority of the population, writing software is just not attractive it's what technical minded people do, which is 10% of the population at best. Couple that with the fact that the industry up until now has not been that attractive to females and you start to see that there are a bunch of technical and cultural issue working against coding becoming the next mass profession.

The majority of people look at a logic puzzle and see frustration, they don't see a challenge that is interesting to solve. The minority that do, have the spark that is needed to code. Figure out how to give everyone that spark, and you may have a flame, but you still have to deal with all the other issues once you get the fire going.

I agree, and also I'd like to add something. While it's not really an attractive job to many people, it's also relatively difficult for most people. Farming is different in that it's easy for anyone to do (it's just manual labor). Realistically, you can't expect a large portion of the population to be capable of programming.

> Realistically, you can't expect a large portion of the population to be capable of programming.

Then you look at the code of the people who are attracted to coding, and 'capable' of it and pale in fear of how bad the code is (even if it works).

Exactly. I think that metalsmithing in the past would be a better analog for programming today. It is difficult, takes years of apprenticeship to do well, but it still provides a valuable service (horseshoes among many other things).

Not everybody back then were smiths though, just like not everyone today will be programmers. Programming definitely has a great impact on society (like smithing did), but if you consider the incredibly important impact that farmers have, they hardly even compare.

Farming "Just manual labor"?

Common, have you ever tried to plant something?

THAT is difficult!

Any profession could become a mass profession.

> Farming is different in that it's easy for anyone to do (it's just manual labor).

I have a small grain farm and also develop software professionally. I find software development is the easier of the two, personally.

Problems in software all go back to the rules of computational theory. It's not exactly easy, but the space is fairly limited and can be understood with some effort.

Problems in farming are all over the map. Sometimes you have to engineer a new piece of equipment to get you out of a jam, other times you're dealing with biology, medicine, mechanical work, sales, you name it, you probably have to deal with it. And you need a solution now. By tomorrow, your profits for the year will be gone.

I grew up on a citrus farm in Florida, I was the first generation to leave the far after NAFTA due to the fact that we could no longer compete as a family farm. While Farming has a lot of variables that cannot be controlled and is grueling work, I did not find it to be any more mentally difficult than development. There is a lot of science in farming for sure, but one thing about farming that is very different than software development is that only one person needs to do the thinking and can then delegate to less inclined individuals. The structure of the workforce is different in that a single thinker can do the processing for a group, in software there is no such luxury, if I do all the thinking for another developer then I might as well take the 10 minutes to write it down and save the salary of the other developer. That's the big difference, roles can be delegated in some professions, in others they just cant. To some extent they can be in software, you can have a test developer, and a build manager but for the most part each one is working out specific, unique problems in their domain.

> but one thing about farming that is very different than software development is that only one person needs to do the thinking and can then delegate to less inclined individuals

True, although, technically speaking, that work still exists. The programmer just delegates it to the computer instead of having people do it. There is no reason why you couldn't have an assembly line of humans hand-compiling your programs, if you really wanted to. Once you give them the basic rules, they can set forth and complete any task that you ask of them. It is just repetition at that point.

Farming is quickly going in the same direction. The delegatable jobs are, more and more, being done by machines.

This is of course assuming that programming in the future is exactly what programming today is. I find that hard to believe.

I'm sure that the edge of the programming will still have a similar feeling. However the vast majority of applications are pretty simple. I wouldn't be surprised if we see the process of creating those applications become dead simple, any person with a high school education can do it, and will do it. In fact it will probably become a part of the educational process... the way my education involved creating powerpoint slides, my kids will learn to make simple db queries (not necessarily in code) that can be accessed by a simple user interface made in a vb like environment.

You still have to solve for the software crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis it is still with us today. It is the major reason that I am not optimistic about it changing in the 10-20 year outlook baring a major shift in how software is assembled. The problem with those VB and access solutions is they inevitably do not scale. I think they are great for empowering people but I have seen the pattern too many times where one of these solutions outlives it's intent and becomes a critical system at a company that then pours far more money into keeping it alive than they ever would have should they have hired a developer in the first place. Some of the best environments I have seen is organizations that encourage business people to solution in access, but once a homegrown solution hits a certain size they hand it off as a prototype to a development team to turn it into a robust solution. Therein lies the issue, the tool that empower people inherently lead to sloppy solutions that further the software crisis, the tools that help manage quality and scalability don't empower the lay person. No one is even remotely close to crossing that chasm. If anything web apps have made the two that much further apart.

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