SHARE Follow this article on Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Bookmark and Share

IT deja vu...code generation


I suppose the longer you have been around, the more you see old ideas come back as new ideas, or be discovered by someone with less mileage as though they are brand new.

Let us consider code generation... Articles (and now blog posts) appear regularly about how code generation is going to put programmers out of a job. I suupose the latest culprit is Model-Driven Development, based on UML.

But before that, there were I-CASE tools that generated code from Information Engineering models.

And before that there were 4GLs/interpretive languages (which at least allowed easier report writing).

And before, even compilers were seen as the death of real programming in Assembler.... you can keep going back to moving tubes around or something.

Our industry and discipline NEEDS code generation and automation, to take over the mundane and repeatable functions that no one should have to  code anymore. Besides, there will never be enough programmers to do all the projects on every company's backlog, so we need programmers to be creating the software that can't be produced automatically. Programmer obselescence has been predicted many times over the decades, and may continue to be, but I would not bet on it anytime soon.



blog comments powered by Disqus