> I started to become interested in programming around late 90s and I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs will make programming obsolete as a profession.

The version of this hype that I remember from circa 2004 was UML[1] was going to make most programming automated. You'd have an architect that would draw out your problem's architecture in a GUI[2], press a button to automate all the code to build that architecture, and have a programmer fill in a couple dozen lines of business logic. Boom, program done by two or three people in a couple weeks, let's all go home. It uh, didn't work out that way.

You can read a lot more about all this by following the various links to concepts & products from Rational's Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software (the Rational Unified Process page in particular brings back some memories). It wasn't badly intentioned, but it was a bit of a phase that the industry went through that ultimately didn't work out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Component-based-Software-...

There was definitely a widely held belief in the late 90s, early 00s that programming was commoditized to the point that it would be fully offshored to the lowest cost of labor. This happened in some areas and failed. It still happens now and then. But I remember hearing some of that based on OO and libraries making it so unskilled people could just put together legos.

It had definitely been a thing even from the 80s, though everyone always seemed to think it would be the next generation of languages that did it. For example, in 1981, James Martin wrote a book called "Application Development Without Programmers".

>I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs

Oh man, you had it lucky. Object databases were going to replace SQL multiple times, XML would eat the world and I strongly remember a UX person taking one look at Ruby on Rails at maybe 1.0 and declaring he would not be needing us programmers anymore.

It's an idea that surfaces every few years - back in 1981 I can remember reading about "The Last One" - named because it was supposed to be the last computer program that would ever need to be written:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

I find the idea that IntelliJ being a job killer hard to believe, just like when some of my colleagues used to think Dreamweaver would wipe out frontend development - or 'HTML slicing', as we called it back then.

I remember reading 25-30 years ago about how 4GLs and object libraries were going to democratize software creation. Don't recall it being sold as an apocalypse for coders, though.

Yeah, I can confirm, before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last thing to go.