2 minutes
The future of software development
Again an article (German) about the future of programming. Though this time a sensible and sound approach to predict the future: no prediction at all. The author concentrates on the gains of productivity made possible through ever higher levels of abstraction. Both parts of his statement are well understood and agreed upon. Higher abstraction means less repetition (by humans) and thus less room for errors. This results in more free capacity to solve more complex tasks and thus higher productivity. The process started with programming languages (actually already before with the use of assembler instructions) and goes on to the heir goal of software factories, programs that build programs suiting the needs of the user without any human intervention. But this, as the author concludes, is a unlikely future. Software development seldom goes this far. For example, there are still a few COBOL programs in production and most code written nowadays for these systems is generated automatically by programs but these programs are written by software developers. Thus the future of software development will lie in handling the layers of abstraction, to communicate the algorithms to the computers which is not very different from today’s work. Nevertheless, most time is, and probably will be, spent on digital housekeeping and not in pondering abstract problems.