The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
Summary
The article traces the long history of attempts to eliminate programmers, showing that every wave of tooling lowered the barrier for simple tasks but did not remove the need for skilled developers. It cites COBOL, 4GLs, CASE tools, expert systems, no-code/low-code, and large language models to argue that the core challenge is translating human intent into reliable software, not coding itself. The piece concludes that the future of programming is evolution, not extinction, with ongoing demand for deep understanding, architecture, and system integration.