"Coding used to be much harder than it is today. It takes much less devotion and study to make programs these days and its getting easier all the time... and programming is perpetually going to get easier. (It used to take HTML expertise to make a website, now it just takes a MySpace account)."
You all know what "code smell" means? What we have here is "essay smell": a paragraph which is so far removed from reality that you begin to doubt everything else in the essay.
The invention of MySpace and Facebook didn't make web programming easier; they just raised the state of the art.
Similarly: Cheap, quality cameras have not and will not "obsolete the craft of photography" (just as cheap, quality word processors did not kill professional writing). And equipping us all with Illustrator and the Gimp has not hurt the professional graphic designers. (Are you kidding me? Or do you actually know a talented graphic designer who is out of work? Could I have their email address?)
Also, if you think about it for five seconds, you will realize that video did not kill the radio star. (Douglas Adams. Casey Kasem. Click and Clack. Howard Stern. The frickin' Beatles, and every other Top 40 group in the history of rock, a musical form which was invented after TV.) Citing a Buggles lyric as a literal fact is another essay smell, BTW.
So you agree that from assembly to C to python there is no lowering in difficulty? Whoever uses python today is using, indirectly, both C and assembly, a la scientist: working on the shoulder of past giants. And that's just an example, there are hundreds.
What the article comes to say is that whatever is giving you a job today has a huge chance of becomming a commodity tomorrow. Ready for use at the hands of anyone.
Great craftmen and demand for them won't ever disappear; what vanishes -with easier programming tech, with easier image acquisition means, etc- is the crowd of low quality "professionals" that used to charge you a lot for what now is trivial.
"So you agree that from assembly to C to python there is no lowering in difficulty?"
I can't quite parse that. But it's meaningless to claim that Python is "less difficult" than C. Sure, it's a lot easier to write a dynamic web page in Python than in C, just as it's easier to write a letter with a pen than with a needle. But what if you're building a real-time operating system? A high-performance Java compiler? A video card device driver?
To the extent that you can compare the difficulty of two languages as opposed to two tasks, I tend to agree with Spolsky: in general, it's more difficult to learn Python than to learn C or assembly:
"The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time." Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning.
"And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder."
Python may collect your garbage for you, but you're still going to have to learn what garbage collection is, and what its performance implications are. I think Rails is great, but I really wonder whether I'd have understood and appreciated Rails if I had never seen vanilla CGI, or designed a data model in raw SQL.
I found the article to be pretty bad. It made me think of Marc Andreesen's critique of the Economist predictions - this one struck me as a technologist writing about non-technology, and badly at that.
Reading such things I always wonder how much our view of reality is distorted by our job. Programming is an industry which is especially unsafe, but this trend of change seems to be extrapolated here too much.
You all know what "code smell" means? What we have here is "essay smell": a paragraph which is so far removed from reality that you begin to doubt everything else in the essay.
The invention of MySpace and Facebook didn't make web programming easier; they just raised the state of the art. Similarly: Cheap, quality cameras have not and will not "obsolete the craft of photography" (just as cheap, quality word processors did not kill professional writing). And equipping us all with Illustrator and the Gimp has not hurt the professional graphic designers. (Are you kidding me? Or do you actually know a talented graphic designer who is out of work? Could I have their email address?)
Also, if you think about it for five seconds, you will realize that video did not kill the radio star. (Douglas Adams. Casey Kasem. Click and Clack. Howard Stern. The frickin' Beatles, and every other Top 40 group in the history of rock, a musical form which was invented after TV.) Citing a Buggles lyric as a literal fact is another essay smell, BTW.