meaning | This is the end of computer programming as we know it. (And I'm fine.) (2023)

I was 5 or 6 years old when I first felt the joy of programming. It was the early 1980s when few people had computers. One day my father brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the first in the worldaffordable PCs for the mass market. The device looked like a clunky keyboard; had48 kilobytes of memory(My phone has about 125,000 times more RAM); and used your TV as a screen. The software, mostly games, came on cassettes that you inserted into your computer and plugged into a tape recorder—then a floppy disk drive.

But the games took forever to load, and while I waited, I often marveled at the amazing programmingCourse bookthat came from Spectrum. The book was full of simple programs written to be accessibleBASICA programming language. Most of it was over my head, but as I experimented with the examples, I started to noticeshudderwhat people who fall in love with computer programming often talk about - the discovery that with the right spells you can bring these otherwise slow machines to life and make them do your bidding.

By the time I got into high school, my passion for coding had deepened (I was very popular!) and a few weeks earlier in college I thought maybe coding could be something I could do for a living. Of course I did not insist on it; For me, writing words won out over writing code.

Now may finally be the time. In a poetic irony, software development appears to be one of the fields most likely to be transformed by artificial intelligence. Over the next few years, A.I. it can transform computer programming from a rare, high-paying profession to a widely available skill that people can easily learn and use in their jobs in various fields. It won't necessarily be terrible for computer programmers—the world will still need people with advanced programming skills—but it will be great for the rest of us. Computers that we can all "program", computers that do not require special training to adapt and improve their functionality, and that do not speak code: the future is fast becoming the present.

artificial intelligence Tools based on large language models – e.gOpenAI-Codex, from the company that brought you ChatGPT, or AlphaCode from Google's DeepMind division - have already begun to change the way many professional programmers do their jobs. So far, these tools are workingprimarily as assistants- You can find bugs, write explanations for poorly documented pieces of code, and make code suggestions for routine tasks (similar to how Gmail offers ideas for email replies - "Sounds good"; "Good").

But AI programmers are quickly getting smart enough to keep up with human programmers. DeepMind reported last yearin the journal Sciencethat when AlphaCode programs were evaluated based on responses submitted by human contestants in coding competitions, their results were "roughly equivalent to those of an inexperienced programmer with several months to a year of training."

"Coding will become obsolete," said Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google and Apple.predictedlately. Welsh now runs artificial intelligence. A start-up, but its predictions, while perhaps egotistical, do not sound improbable:

I think the conventional idea of ​​"writing a program" is on the verge of dying out, and in fact most of the software we know is being replaced by AI for all but very specific applications. systems that areeducatedinsteadprogrammed.In situations where a "simple" program is needed, these programs are generated by the AI ​​itself. instead of hand coding.

Welsh's argument, presented earlier this year at the Association for Computing Machinery's house organ, was titled "The End of Programming," but there's also a way AI can mark itBeginninga new way of programming - one that doesn't require us to learn the code, but turns human language instructions into software. artificial intelligence "It doesn't matter how you program it - it will try to understand what you mean," says Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker Nvidiain a speech this weekat the Computex conference in Taiwan. He added: "We've closed the digital divide. Now everyone is a programmer - all you have to do is tell the computer something."

But wait a minute – shouldn't programming be one of the must-have careers in the digital age? In the decades since I tinkered with my Spectrum, computer programming has gone from a geeky hobby to an almost essential profession, the one skill you need to acquire to survive technological change, no matter how absurd or soulless the advice sounds. Joe Biden to miners:Learn to program!TwitterTrollsto dismissed journalists:Learn to program!Tim Cook for French children:Learn to program!

Programming can still be a valuable skill to learn, if only as an intellectual exercise, but it would be foolish to see it as an isolated endeavor from the automation that makes it possible. For much of computing history, coding has been moving toward greater and greater simplicity. In the past, only a small clergy of scientists who understood binary bits of 1s and 0s could manipulate computers. Over time, from developmentMontagestudieProgramming is enhanced with more readable languages ​​such as C, Python and Javaclimbed upwhat computer scientists call increasing valuesabstraction- With each step we move further away from the electronic guts of the computer and become more accessible to the people who use them.

AI can now enable the final level of abstraction: the level where you can ask a computer to do something in the same way you would ask another human to do it.

So far, the developers seem fine with how the A.I. changing jobs. GitHub, Microsoft's encoder repository,2,000 programmers were surveyedLast year on how they use GitHub's artificial intelligence. Coding assistant, co-pilot. Most said Copilot helped them feel less frustrated and more satisfied at work; 88 percent said it improved their productivity. Google researchers found that among the developers of A.I.reduced"Encoding iteration time" med 6 procent.

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