"X Will Replace Programmers" Since 1959

Do you know what the phrase "X will replace programmers" has in common with the Barbie doll? They both appeared in 1959.

Yes, you read that right. Attempts to replace programmers with a "simple accessible tool" are only a few years younger than my father.

And it all started, believe it or not, with... COBOL. Even its name stands for Common Business-Oriented Language. The language promised to simplify business software development so that managers and analysts could write software solutions themselves.

But that did not happen. COBOL quickly became popular: it triggered a wave of simple solutions, and those very quickly turned into complex systems. Then the obvious became clear: specially trained people were needed. That is how the next generation of developers grew: the entry barrier got lower, business demand became enormous.

Does this sound familiar?

Then came the golden age of domain-oriented languages, which aimed to remove the need to write algorithms, replacing it with declarative programming. That is how SQL came into the world.

In the late 1980s, the industry started thinking that maybe models and specifications should be described, and the system should generate code. That is how the CASE paradigm was born (Computer-Aided Software Engineering).

This time, the promises included radical productivity growth and independence from human factors. People do not write code, the system generates it.

Again, the more complex the tasks were, the worse the results became. The larger the system, the harder it was to maintain. Code was generated from templates, often bloated, which led to serious performance problems. And so on.

Still, that wave pushed standardization of requirements and specifications and cemented new roles: business analysts and system architects.

In the 90s, that locomotive only gained speed: Visual Basic, Excel, ERP systems, the Web and its no-code editors that existed long before the term itself. The first visual web builders appeared as early as the mid-90s, when the web was barely on its feet.

Who among the old guard does not remember Macromedia Dreamweaver? Every time someone presents a "revolutionary" solution for building web products exclusively with a mouse, somewhere a tiny Kuchma hiccups and says, "we already had this."

And today it is LLMs, or AI. It will generate code, configure it, run it, and you only need to explain in words what you want.

Does this sound familiar?

And again, as soon as tasks cross a certain complexity threshold, the same old need for professionals rises to the surface.

They will be different, not like us. They will be "integrators," "prompt engineers," or, forgive me Lord, "vibe coders." We will either join their ranks or remain dinosaurs.

This will continue until the heat death of the Universe: industry and business demands will produce new tools, programmers will be "replaced," demand for new specialists will emerge, it will bring a new generation, and so on.

And only Barbie will sit in her convertible and watch this hustle with a faint smile.

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Author: Serhii Babich Source profile: https://dou.ua/users/babich/