Programming Beyond Practices

Chapter 8. The Future of Software Development

Just as in the previous chapters, you’ll find a short story in the pages that follow. But since this chapter also serves as the book’s epilogue, I’d like to step out of my narrator role for a moment to talk about something important.

I wrote this book because I believe the shift away from “programmer as coding specialist” is inevitable. If that’s true, then our entire field will need to prepare itself for the not-so-distant future when “programmer as technically skilled solver of ordinary human problems” becomes the norm.

I’ve been writing code for a couple decades now, so this idea feels radical—and also quite liberating. The interesting parts of programming to me have always been the problem-solving, communication, and human-centric aspects of things; code was just the most effective tool I could find to serve those purposes.

The stories in this book have been written without code samples, but they have the explicit goal of helping both you and me focus on the many interesting higher-level challenges we face in software development. But in each scenario, there was a whole lot of code being written behind the scenes; it just wasn’t what we were focusing on.

To complete our journey, we’ll now go a step further and imagine a world in which machines do most of the coding. I promise to tie this back to some practical ideas when we wrap up, but we might as well have some fun before the curtain closes.

In this chapter…

You will catch a ...