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Comment by sami36 | Hacker News Reader

No we can't. I base that on being a software architect who sat through endless useless marketing meetings from IBM & their ilk promising the imminent advent of Doodleware (have a business person with domain knowledge & no technical skills draw a process on this monkey-easy UI tool & we'll generate a working application from it.)

I maintain that being a programmer will still be a highly paid skill in demand for decades to come for one simple reason : You can't bullshit a computer. You can't sweet-talk a machine into accepting your algorithm because of your great personality , looks or any other intangible except for knowing what you're doing. if you want a parallel, look no further than the sorry state of machine translation & that despite the enormous amounts of datasets they've been playing with. Human intelligence & judgement, even on a very very narrowed use case is not something computers are close to replicate.

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Right, the biggest barrier to creating applications isn't programming, per se, it's fully understanding all the logical relationships, dependencies, performance characteristics, and edge cases of the desired features. Compared to getting all this right, writing code is a breeze.

>it's fully understanding all the logical relationships, dependencies, performance characteristics, and edge cases of the desired features.

That IS programming. Don't confuse programming with typing. Programming means understanding a problem and coming up with a precise, logically valid solution.

To be fair, in CNC milling, it is actually possible and common to design your part in a CAD software, and then have the software write the actual instructions for the machine. But of course this still requires a lot of technical knowledge.

In a way it's only as "meta" as it is to have a compiler generate your assembler code.

In a good shop, experience is key, since there is still a lot of domain knowledge like tooling and jigs.

This might remain true as long as human-level intelligence is the exclusive domain of humans.

And that's probably at least for decades to come. But if someone develops a strong AI, this goes out the window. Probably most familiar forms of employment along with it, possibly the entire idea of a society where the labor market is a primary form of economic participation.

Personally, I don't see any technology on the current landscape or the horizon that I think is likely to produce strong AI within decades, maybe even a century. Wouldn't rule it out, though.

I dunno. Perl does a pretty good job of "do what I mean" style programming. Sure, not every hard problem can be solved automatically, but a lot of tasks can be accomplished by a short script or banging keywords into Google, etc.

You still need to tell Perl your intent, laid out in a very specific way. by the time you're ready to write your code, you've already solved 99.9999 % of the problem at hand. you're severely underestimating your smarts.

But Perl also has the problem of "what the hell did the last guy mean that touched this?" style programming.

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