I wish I had a nickel for every time someone told me programming was dead. Back in the 70's CASE was going to make programmers obsolete. At one time I was told spreadsheets were going to lead to the demise of programming because the average user could arrive at their own answers. The list goes on.

The best argument I heard was when an "expert" panel at an early personal computer show pronounced that COBOL programmers would soon be extinct because all high school students would soon be graduating knowing how to program. An elderly gentleman (to me, I was in my early 20's) rose and said that wasn't so. He said, "Look around you, everyone in this room knows how to read and write. But how many of you are going to write novels?"

I've never been a fan of a computer science education. Certainly there is an advantage to being taught, but I want programmers who want to learn instead. The best hires I've made have been people who did not have a degree but had been self taught. That indicated to me the desire to learn, even if it is on their own.

One time I had this conversation with an accountant who wondered why programmers were necessary, hadn't we written everything yet. I reminded him that programming is less than a century old, while accounting was thousands of years old. But what I thought was my best response back to him was, "Who programmed cellphones before they existed?"

My most fun and challenging projects have been when I worked in languages that did already have all the good stuff preprogrammed (spoolers, communications, math, etc.), unlike today when you spend most of your time learning the APIs of the packages that have already been written. But there are plenty of libraries that can be yet written.

We still have challenges ahead, multi-cores are here to stay and efficiently using them is still not baked into the languages.

The world has not caught on to the information age. Industrial Age thinking still prevails. A friend related a story from his work where a VP had bragged about how they planned to add off-shoring in both India and China. He thought that at the end of the day the programmers present would transmit their code to the next team who would continue coding and then ship it off to the next. He said, "Just imagine what your code will look like when you show up the next day." :crazy:

And be honest, we still have a long way to go on developing the human-computer interface.