alt Hacker NewsI recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart
Which includes this excellent line:
> 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.
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I guess the idea that a programmer can create software that then runs on multiple computers would have blown their mind.
In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher at community college night school was at a party and a man who he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now too!
This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!”
The word programmer had a very different meaning 40 years ago.
They do. Servers, smartphones, most embedded systems, don't need an "operator" as in the past. Your source was probably thinking of that kind of "programmer".