Thread: programming obsolete status...

hmm... i'd want a professional's opinion on the matter... salem? adrianxw? personally i feel that the only programming worth while is either that you are told to do... [if you work] or that which releases your creative juices... i won't question the latter, but even assigned programming has the potential for redundancy...

A little history...

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Quote by Charles H. Duell, (commissioner of US Office of Patents), urging President William McKinley to abolish the patents office in 1899.

As the technologies advance, so do the expectations of my customers. My last project here was for a bus/train ticketing system based on a contactless smart card. This card has a processor, volatile and non volatile memory and runs an OS, (called StarCOS). A few years ago, this kind of thing was unimaginable, a couple of years later, the prototypes were appearing, but the card took 4-5 seconds to boot, our customer wanted the card to boot, load a stored program, enter a dialog with a reader, conduct secure cash transactions, record it all and then close down, and by the way, 5 times a second! We did it. I don't know what they will want next, but I do know they will want it.

I can imagine sometime in the future when software has developed to the extent that it is self modifying/morphing and that specifying the requirement is all that will be required, but I think that is a long way off yet, and turn ups in the tech field may cause me to rethink this view.

I voted no.