Simon Willison’s Weblog

Application development without programmers (via) This book by James Martin published in 1982, includes the following in the preface:

Applications development did not change much for 20 years, but now a new wave is crashing in. A rich diversity of nonprocedural techniques and languages are emerging. As these languages improve, they promise to change the entire fabric of DP development.

This means a major change for many of the personnel involved in DP, from the DP manager to the junior programmer. DP personnel have always welcomed new hardware and software, but it is not as easy to accept fundamental changes in the nature of one's job. Many DP professionals and, not surprisingly, programmers will instinctively resist some of the methods described in this book.

(I had to look up DP - it stands for Data Processing, and was a common acronym for general IT work up until the 1980s.)

I enjoy they way this echoes with today's fears of the impact of AI-assisted programming on developer careers!

The early 80s were a wild time for computing:

Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future will have to work at least in part without programmers.