alt Hacker NewsPeople keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture?
Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a by product of a car, a tv, or your fridge. No ordinary folk ever said “I’m going to go a buy WinZip now”. They simply had a variant of WinZip available with whatever computer they bought. There is simply no category of people who are willing to pay for “high quality hand crafted software”, except for perhaps a few ideologically motivated people.
Software development “lost” because it was seen as “something that comes for free with a computer”, and not something that people have to actively buy, like they buy TVs, fridges, or paintings.
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Printing presses are not typewriters.
The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwriting lingered for quite a while, since they were very demanding in terms of skill, and all mistakes were permanent.
Arguably it's not until digital writing tools emerged handwriting was truly displaced. That made typing on a keyboard accessible enough that anyone with working hands can do it fairly easily.
> And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass.
Do products like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office Suite not count as “targeted at mass?” People—normal people—absolutely used to pay for software before SaaS took hold.
I don’t think the problem is that normal people don’t want to buy ““artisan software”” but that people are so cynical about software companies that giving them any money at all is asking to have the rug pulled out from under you.
Drawing, not buying hand-painted pictures. Writing, not buying hand-written books. You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the argument.
> When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture
So programming "ended" if it's no longer such a dominant profession, even if plenty of people still do it as an art/craft/hobby and some of them even get paid to do so?
Doesn't sound like the "end of programming" to me, more a reduction in the number of programming jobs. One that if anything is overdue - many developers today get paid to do jobs that shouldn't need to exist even without AI.
>When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture?
comparing scribes to writers and artists and software developers is insane
I’m confused by your example. Prior to the printing press, hand written books (or any reading material) would not have been accessible to the masses; hence the low literacy rates.
Furthermore, while no one was saying “I’m going to go buy WinZip now”, many were lining up to buy WinRAR?
Finally, the issue with “high quality hand crafted software” is that software and similar projects are made possible through engineering not through artistry.
Simply put:
"Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure." — Henry Petroski
People really need to stop finding one vaguely similar situation in the past and say "this is what will happen". The past is a different country, and the outcomes depend on many factors and aren't predestined.
Printing press did not kill writing at all, only the job of scribes. One still had to write their ideas down and work on a manuscript and some one had to set the press up (not trivial at all). All that is to say that I think the ability to write code from scratch is still necessary while I don't really think the printing press metaphor is apt I think being able to write scripts and write small programs to do stuff you want by hand is still useful even though it's true that LLM's can do this sometimes you want to understand the thing fully and to work exactly how you want it.