I was listening to an Acquired episode and the guest mentioned the role of computers (people) being replaced by electronic computers, and how programming/coding will/is seeing the same fate.
Here’s the episode:
And here on YouTube where I got the transcript.
Here’s the quote:
I self-identify as a computer programmer. It’s like the thing I like to do the most. And I’m like, man, that’s sort of like saying I’m—do remember like the calculators, people who like calculated things before we had calculators? I’m like, am I that?
So he was saying “calculators”, but they were in fact called “computers”.
From chatgpt:
Before electronic machines, a computer was a person—often working in teams—whose job was to carry out complex mathematical calculations by hand or with mechanical aids like slide rules and adding machines. They were employed in fields such as astronomy, navigation, ballistics, engineering, and finance, producing essential data like star catalogs, tide tables, and artillery trajectories. The work demanded precision and was often checked through repeated computation to avoid errors. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many human computers were women, notably groups like the Harvard Computers and the NASA mathematicians who later became central to space exploration. As digital computers emerged in the mid-20th century, the occupation gradually disappeared, and the word “computer” shifted to mean the machines themselves.
And here on Wikipedia:
Anyway, the sentiment of his quote hit a chord in me.
I really like programming. I identify as a programmer. I’ve been writing code for 25-30 years. And the role is going away.
This is normal. It happens all the time, and now it is happening to my thing.
It’s cool, expected. Move on further up the stack.
I was talking this over with chatgpt and we were talking though the general challenging of developing software.
We came up with this nice idea that a big piece of software engineering is about converting an open system of requirements/desires into a closed system that we can build/verified/tested.
This was a really nice way of putting it. I wish I saw it this way 25 years ago.
From Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month” (via chatgpt):
The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.
Nod.
I think a lot of human problems are in this form. We close things up so we can describe them or share them or verify them or whatever.
We operate with closed systems in an open system world/universe. We have to. It’s all too hard/complicated otherwise. It makes me think what useful/interesting things we’ve sheared away.