The demise of the programmer

[Matt Graham]

On 2017-09-14 11:20, James Mcphee wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 9:23 AM, <techlists at phpcoderusa.com> wrote:
>> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learning-how-code-still-worth-rajat-bhageria
>> which predicts that computers will be self coding and coding skills 
>> will
>> be obsolete.
>> 
>> I've read other such articles in the recent past.  I'm also reading 
>> about
>> robots replacing jobs....
> Ahh, I remember this argument when COBOL came out.  The excitement
> never changes.

The fun thing about some of this machine learning stuff is that you can 
play with it and see exactly what it's capable of.  
https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn , for example.  (Warning:  Requires 
stuff that is probably not in your package manager, installation may be 
a bit of a PITA.)  As seen in http://crow202.org/misc/char-rnn.html and 
http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/ , this particular neural network is 
good for comedy, but terrible at being coherent.  Even with a relatively 
simple problem ("name a paint color"), you wind up with 
http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-invented-by-neural-network 
.  "Stanky Bean".  Sure, let's go with that.

As Public Enemy said many years ago, don't believe the hype.  Not yet, 
anyway.

-- 
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.