That’s what you’d get if you’d just flip bits randomly. And computers are actually much better at dealing with binary data then people. What computers lack is imagination and creativity. But for how long? Genetic algorithms for creating new things are getting pretty advanced.

Any hypothesis based machine learning system could be sort of considered a program writing another program. These include things like Neural Networks, Support Vector machines, Decision Trees, etc.

Programming will get easier and easier over time, and I would imagine that over the next 20 years or so it will look nothing like what we see today. There will be a few people doing exotic types of mathematics, and lots of lower-end MIS types using intuitive systems that don’t allow a lot of mistakes and figure out most of the difficult stuff.

Ultimately, as each new generation of tooling comes along, it allows developers to do more powerful things. So the scale of the task increases to the point where specialists are still needed. In my view, there is a definite on-going role for for the “systems analyst” who knows how to take an vaguely-worded, incomplete, and contradictory bunch of requirements expressed in common verbal language and ask the right questions in order to break them down into simple logical components and then develop and deliver them into usable systems.

Sure, if you see yourself as a “Java Programmer” (replace Java with whatever you like there) then maybe, there’s a definite time-horizon to what you might see as your chosen profession. But if you see yourself more as simply an architect, analyst, or developer, there will always be a need for professionals who break down user’s needs and produce systems that meet those needs.

Systems that write systems? Someone has to write those systems. And until said system can attend meetings, understand natural language, as well as expressed tone and body language, resolve competing claims for priority, etc, there’ll still be a need for someone to take all that “stuff” and produce the abstraction that the systems-creation system can understand as valid input.

My own first encounter with this was an advert for a program called “The Last One” – meaning the last program you’d ever need, as it would write all the others for you. See, for example, Whatever happened to ‘The Last One’?.

I’ve seen a few new programs since, so I guess it didn’t quite work out…