Lew said:
That risk, expressed as an absolute like that, is zero. The risk can be seen
from two sides: the companies' and the programmers'. Generally the risk is
that the benefit to companies / opportunity for programmers in good
programming will diminish, but it really cannot cease to exist altogether.
Sure, okay.
The risk is that the space of problems that require wicked awesome developers
will shrink, relegating most to day-laborer tasks. The likelihood is that
there will always be significant demand for truly skilled programmers to keep
pushing the envelope.
Absolutely. I am not concerned with that risk. When (and if!) software
becomes more trivial to write, the problems that software solves will
change until there is still need for skilled programmers. The process
doesn't run like clockwork, so there are times when it seems that
programmers are becoming more commoditized; but history teaches that
this will change when new kinds of problems arise. My concern is quite
on the opposite side of the spectrum; that companies are adopting
approaches that prevent them from taking advantage of the level of skill
that is offered to them by their development task. The result is that
problems which should be solved quickly and easily often take a long
time and a large amount of work because the project is planned as if it
will.
To be clear; I do not see frequent use of Java as a symptom of this
problem. Even quite skilled programmers often reasonably choose
languages that don't require a huge amount of skill to read their code.
I simply used your post as a springboard to discuss a topic that
concerns me.