Comment by simonw
18 hours ago
I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart
Which includes this excellent line:
> Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future will have to work at least in part without programmers.
They do. Servers, smartphones, most embedded systems, don't need an "operator" as in the past. Your source was probably thinking of that kind of "programmer".
I guess the idea that a programmer can create software that then runs on multiple computers would have blown their mind.
VisiCalc was published in 1979.
The future used to be way less widely distributed than it is now.
Lisp machines were also created in 1979, pushing the concept that using a computer is programing.
The ratio of computer minutes per programmer-minute has indeed gone to an amazing number nowadays! I work in VFX (at RSP) and this fact is vividly illustrated for me all the time by the millions of thread-hours we go through on the renderfarm each week!
Despite all the astounding developments in AI/ML though, I still think there's still a critical need for the application of human/biological imagination and creativity. Sure the amount of leverage between thoughts and CPU cycles can be utterly giant now, but it doesn't seem to diminish the need (where performance or correctness/less-bugs are needed) for a full understanding of what the computer actually gets up to in the end.
For what it's worth, we do have an ML department at RSP and they are doing great! But I'm not sure we'd get very far if we tried to vibe-code the underlying pipeline, as it really requires full understanding of many interlocking pieces.
In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher at community college night school was at a party and a man who he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now too!
This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!”
The word programmer had a very different meaning 40 years ago.
What makes you think that trend won't continue? In the Myspace era people constantly said "oh I know some html", now we will have people saying "oh I can make LLMs generate python"
Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling. Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs taking software jobs, but it is possible they will require the level of skill to be employable to spike.