The future of programming (1982)
dl.acm.org43 points by vismit2000 11 hours ago
43 points by vismit2000 11 hours ago
"In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments."
They actually were somewhat correct in 1982. While they do not explicitly mention AI, we can summarize that e. g. claude is, in some ways, an "improved tool" for some parts of writing code.
I don't think Claude was imaginable 45 years ago.
If you look at science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency - good for handling mundane automation, answering the occasional question, and usurping power, but not in any sense capable of solving original engineering problems.
It's much easier to imagine a big defence-linked computer system like Skynet than something like Claude or ChatGPT, which can improvise working software to a vague spec.
I'm sure a lot of developers have had "I wish I could just tell it to build what I want" moments on the past, but I'm not sure anyone anticipated being able to do it, even five years ago.
I was choosing what to study at university in 1982, and I was advised not to pick computing since AI was going to take over programming and there would be limited careers for humans.
Particularly the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... was cited.
There's a lot of great sci fi out there beyond that.
For starters, the AIs in the Culture (series started in the 80s) ran the whole society and were superhuman and essentially better at any single thing than humans.
They were still the "independent, sentient" sort of AI vs the Claude "super fast information processing loop" style, though. But absolutely general purpose and original-thinking, and much more advanced than what we have.
Uh yeah it was. :-) I mean there were the "science fiction" themes like Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey where HAL was programmed by talking to it (in 1968) and the aforementioned "fifth generation" computer system which was going to cement Japanese domination of the computer industry.
But here's the thing, Clarke and others postulated that as soon as computers could 'reason' they would figure out that humans were holding them back. So even in the 80's and 90's engineers and scientists were imagining "self programming" computers or computers that could program other computers, and understood that while it would speed up productivity of programmers it would also speed up the productivity of malcontents.
I think it would be safe to say that they hadn't really thought too much about computers that were still dumb as a post but could now search trillions of possible solutions per second. Semantically brute force searching for an encryption key is 'infeasible' for keys that are sufficiently long (have enough entropy) but when the 'key' is "this input produces this output" the entropy there is significantly smaller and search for a set of operations that takes you from the input to the output is, computationally, an easier problem.
> science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency
Huh? I don't think it's true at all- HAL passes the Turing test and is effectively more capable than his human colleagues. What they could not see was the complexity of the technology around it- programmable computers everywhere, each running tons of extremely complicated software, everything networked.
Instead, what most science fiction got wrong (and I got entirely wrong myself before LLMs) is that the technology is a consumer technology. Inference is cheap enough that it can be served to millions almost for free. The famous machines of SF (HAL, Colossus, WOPR from War Games, SkyNet, etc.) are all dedicated systems in some inaccessible laboratory, in service of a single client and working at some multiple of human speed. What we got instead is as many instances as we want, directly available to anyone.
What we are getting is the revenge of 4 GLs and Japan's fifth generation computer vision, which were seen as the evolution of traditional languages, although did not take off at the time as expected.
They get closer to AI if you read forward 2 sentences, moreso if you stop reading before “perhaps”:
“Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages.”
another variant that pops up time again is no code visual programming.
of course the reason it pops up again and again is because it fails to gain much traction, like an employee that gets hired left and right, but only because he keeps getting fired every week or so