

Your business model will die - albertcardona
http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2007/11/your-business-model-called-its-leaving.html
One technology always replaces another despite any efforts to stop the change.
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mechanical_fish
"Coding used to be much harder than it is today. It takes much less devotion
and study to make programs these days and its getting easier all the time...
and programming is perpetually going to get easier. (It used to take HTML
expertise to make a website, now it just takes a MySpace account)."

You all know what "code smell" means? What we have here is "essay smell": a
paragraph which is so far removed from reality that you begin to doubt
everything else in the essay.

The invention of MySpace and Facebook didn't make web programming easier; they
just raised the state of the art. Similarly: Cheap, quality cameras have not
and will not "obsolete the craft of photography" (just as cheap, quality word
processors did not kill professional writing). And equipping us all with
Illustrator and the Gimp has not hurt the professional graphic designers. (Are
you kidding me? Or do you actually know a talented graphic designer who is out
of work? Could I have their email address?)

Also, if you think about it for five seconds, you will realize that video did
_not_ kill the radio star. (Douglas Adams. Casey Kasem. Click and Clack.
Howard Stern. The frickin' _Beatles_ , and _every other_ Top 40 group in the
history of rock, a musical form which was invented after TV.) Citing a Buggles
lyric as a literal fact is another essay smell, BTW.

~~~
albertcardona
So you agree that from assembly to C to python there is no lowering in
difficulty? Whoever uses python today is using, indirectly, both C and
assembly, a la scientist: working on the shoulder of past giants. And that's
just an example, there are hundreds.

What the article comes to say is that whatever is giving you a job today has a
huge chance of becomming a commodity tomorrow. Ready for use at the hands of
anyone.

Great craftmen and demand for them won't ever disappear; what vanishes -with
easier programming tech, with easier image acquisition means, etc- is the
crowd of low quality "professionals" that used to charge you a lot for what
now is trivial.

~~~
mechanical_fish
"So you agree that from assembly to C to python there is no lowering in
difficulty?"

I can't quite parse that. But it's meaningless to claim that Python is "less
difficult" than C. Sure, it's a lot easier to write a dynamic web page in
Python than in C, just as it's easier to write a letter with a pen than with a
needle. But what if you're building a real-time operating system? A high-
performance Java compiler? A video card device driver?

To the extent that you can compare the difficulty of two _languages_ as
opposed to two _tasks_ , I tend to agree with Spolsky: in general, it's more
difficult to learn Python than to learn C or assembly:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html)

"The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a
wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-
efficient, you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first,
then use the wizzy tool to save time." Code generation tools which pretend to
abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal
with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and
what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they
don't save us time learning.

"And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher
level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a
proficient programmer is getting harder and harder."

Python may collect your garbage for you, but you're still going to have to
learn what garbage collection is, and what its performance implications are. I
think Rails is great, but I really wonder whether I'd have understood and
appreciated Rails if I had never seen vanilla CGI, or designed a data model in
raw SQL.

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ojbyrne
I found the article to be pretty bad. It made me think of Marc Andreesen's
critique of the Economist predictions - this one struck me as a technologist
writing about non-technology, and badly at that.

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maurycy
Reading such things I always wonder how much our view of reality is distorted
by our job. Programming is an industry which is especially unsafe, but this
trend of change seems to be extrapolated here too much.

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staticshock
to quote nick cave & the bad seeds, "just remember that death is not the end"

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chokosabe
An amazing article. Should be right up there. Worth anyone reading....

~~~
mwerty
suggestion: read innovators dilemma.

~~~
pchristensen
and innovator's solution

