The demise of the programmer

[David Schwartz]

For now, I think that IFTTT and Zapier represent the “leading edge” of where programming is heading for lots of otherwise routine needs.

With the growth of SaaS, it’s becoming more of a problem of simply “wiring things together” than programming.

I’d say that well more than half of my coding is simply what I call “plumbing”, and the only reason it takes so frigging long is that people are still overly concerned about “efficiency” in areas where it’s virtually irrelevant.

Back in the early 80’s I had lots of quite vehement arguments with OS guys about how the only real way to solve some of the problems we were facing was to send raw ASCII data with self-identifying flags over the wire, and they’d scream back that this was simply too inefficient, and we had to come up with a bazillion “cannonical data tables” to define every possible common string we could think of so we only needed to send a one or two-byte value instead of a string. 

They were of the school, “Hey, do you guys remember joke #729? What a whopper that one was, eh?!"

HTML came on the scene and us old farts almost choked over the fact that it was stateless and you had to send the entire freaking page back and forth, often multiple times, just to do the simplest things.

Here we are 20 years later and javascript has finally overcome the stateless nature of web pages so now we can send several KB of data back and forth between the client and the server without updating the screen, but those hidden transactions end up moving far more data in many cases than what it takes to refresh the entire screen. And caching has gotten a lot more refined, which reduces the need for data to move around.

Anyway, we’re going to see more ground taking along the lines of making common problems solvable without programming. This is what IFTTT and Zapier are doing, among others.

The tradeoffs will be time-to-market vs. where a new requirement falls along a dimension of “common/generic vs. fully custom” in terms of UI, UX, and logic.

At some point, we’ll see voice-controlled solution drivers that assemble IFTTT and Zapier in the background!

This is NOT “programming”. It may end up replacing a lot of Really Boring Jobs, but who cares? Is this the kind of stuff YOU want to do as a programmer? I sure don’t!

-David Schwartz



> On Sep 14, 2017, at 9:23 AM, techlists at phpcoderusa.com wrote:
> 
> I just read this article  :  https://u2206659.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/click?upn=3cK2FVJjyu2N-2Bxco034fZjcf870OtTzsd2CcXTRutzNapaaIUhV2kiVJtw0KtfmEDaC39Lm8Y-2FfReKZhfF963-2F1fHp2RJqwyx-2FgqqwJMd46MlK-2F0Mg0CEDgf9ECk9pGW_6lpMB7VLnN-2Fj9-2FEErg8-2F-2BMBpb5QxlByTgv2M3fbWD9ebvC-2BWrN3h7jImK8EVWYBewoF-2FEwuQa-2FWdoR5KL1cQa91a-2BYqXkgeUTREjFS0-2BG8sXIfo3GlW7lFc4SVQJGv-2BrBr9EhV5sRa9idiUXeS1R8X9PoKBQSc18h73Lnx31bPoPV0ebdG8iB9QfXlG8gpWOmCL5axxtO-2B4B8P3qOcSeYdU9NRY2KJhqDw5Mz-2Buegao-3D <https://u2206659.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/click?upn=3cK2FVJjyu2N-2Bxco034fZjcf870OtTzsd2CcXTRutzNapaaIUhV2kiVJtw0KtfmEDaC39Lm8Y-2FfReKZhfF963-2F1fHp2RJqwyx-2FgqqwJMd46MlK-2F0Mg0CEDgf9ECk9pGW_6lpMB7VLnN-2Fj9-2FEErg8-2F-2BMBpb5QxlByTgv2M3fbWD9ebvC-2BWrN3h7jImK8EVWYBewoF-2FEwuQa-2FWdoR5KL1cQazJConV6cunTqZIyu7DACYHR4dzO6ckaBsTcahrEHOyB7AiAt9gOuD-2Fnm-2FAPZ9xq1VPrR-2Fydwo6Gw9wjlIdSy05fNnsWanS-2BBDnbdspY-2FypsXMDEuTetZG-2BREsmwD8xtpElygXbR0CPiiOwxg8pWFeA-3D> 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.... And as a precursor sending jobs off-shore will become the norm.  I get contacted all the time by Indian programmers willing to work for 10% of what an American contractor is willing to work for.   Even though I never have, I know there is a lot of challenges of working with offshore Indian programmers... And I know there is a lot of challenges working with American employees...
> 
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