Why there will always be programmers

The latest episode of the .NET Rocks podcast is an interview with Robert Martin. In the interview, Robert Martin gives his view of why there will always be programmers. Here’s my summary/paraphrase of his argument.

Systems are full of details, and somebody has to manage those details. That’s what programmers do. Maybe some day, for example, we will draw diagrams instead of typing lines of text in order to specify computer systems. Fine, but then those diagrams will have lots of detail, and we will need professionals who can manage that complexity. Call them programmers.

Carl Franklin, one of the hosts, added that part of a programmer’s responsibility is to know what needs to happen when things go wrong, which is part of managing the details of a system.

The essential challenge of programming is managing complexity. Those who think the difficulty is primarily translating ideas into computer language syntax line-by-line haven’t written large programs. Writing small programs is challenging, and not many people can do it. But far fewer people can write large programs.

To write a big program, you just break it into lots of small programs, right? Well, that’s true a sense, in the same sense that writing a book is merely a matter of writing chapters, which is merely a matter of writing paragraphs etc. But writing books is hard because the pieces have to hang together in a coherent whole. If part of a book doesn’t quite fit with the whole, the result is aesthetically disappointing. If a part of a program doesn’t quite fit in, it’s called a crash. Paper doesn’t abort, but programs do.