How many remember Edward Yourdon's book, ""The Decline and Fall of the
American Programmer""? This is a snip from Wikipedia:
""Decline and Fall of the American Programmer is a book written by Edward
Yourdon in 1992. It was addressed to American programmers and software
organizations of the 1990s, warning that they were about to be driven
out of business by programmers in other countries who could produce
software more cheaply and with higher quality. Yourdon claimed that
American software organizations could only retain their edge by using
technologies such as ones he described in the book.""
These ideas were prevalent in the late 80's and Yourdon documented them
in his book. Does anyone see the similarities in the discussion?
I cut my IT teeth on a language called MARKIV in 1970. The hype at that
time was that MARKIV was so much more efficient than COBOL that it would
replace the hordes of COBOL programmers. MARKIV was a great language,
but it didn't replace a single COBOL programmer. Prior to MARKIV it was
COBOL replacing Assembler programmers, and before that it was Assembler
replacing machine language coders (now that is a job that I would hate
to tears), and before that it was the peg-boarders.
The debate about the pending death of positions in the IT field has gone
on since 5 minutes after the invention of computers. We have all
adapted to the changing pressures, technology, economics, yada, yada and
we will continue to do so.