alt Hacker NewsAnd it's a false claim. Compilers and assemblers meant eliminating coding, turning your higher level expressions into machine code by hand. And they did exactly that. Very few people, primarily hobbyists or those with a very niche architecture, actually bother to write machine code by hand at this point for any significant amount of work.
It's not. Higher level expression has been advertised as the end of programming for at least two languages I can think of.
COBOL and SQL.
> The idea (don't laugh) was that it would allow ordinary mortals to write programs. -Ed Milne re: COBOL in 1997 on Usenet comp.lang.cobol. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.cobol/c/5xwjgZ9px88?pl...
SQL: > SQL ... completely failed at its intended purpose: a way for non-programmers to ask questions of a database. -John D Cook, Why SQL Failed, https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/02/05/why-sql-failed/
> What we thought we were doing was making it possible for non-programmers to interact with databases. -SQL co-inventor Donald Chamberlin, 1995 SQL reunion, CHM. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...