Comment by maz1b
I always enjoy reading deeply technical writeups like these. I only wonder how much more rare they may or may not get in the AI era.
I always enjoy reading deeply technical writeups like these. I only wonder how much more rare they may or may not get in the AI era.
If your whole career will be using higher order languages with very little data stored on stack (vs heap), why should those programmers care? It seems like normal progression of more abstraction in the tools that we use. Similarly, I have programmed a lot of C and C++ in my career and I never once need assembly language. (I am expecting someone to pop in the convo here and tell me about how I am a terrible C/C++ programmer because I don't know any assembly.)
We have been seeing this shift for a while, where "software engineers" graduate from 3 month bootcamps. Except now most likely they will not be earning 500k making crud apps.
What about the incredible front end Devs that only know JS/CSS/HTML? They can still be true craftspeople in their art, be it cross-browser/platform issues or performance tweaking.
Compare python devs of today to fortran devs of the 60s. Something like that distance. Maybe more. But the trend isnt new.
I don't think they will get more rare; there will always be a top % of engineers that do deep dives. I hope anyway.
But AI won't replace them, nor did the past 50+ years of software development innovation. There's millions (tens of millions?) of higher programming language developers that don't know the difference between stack or heap besides maybe some theory they half remember from school but they don't care because they don't have to think about it for their day job.