It will always be valuable to know a programming language inside and out, but AI is erasing old headaches of context switching between platforms. Code in your favorite language, have AI port it to another language, review and tweak the results. In the future, we may develop largely in pseudo code.
@manton Meanwhile WebAssembly is enabling more and more code portability. Eg. https://extism.org/ looks pretty interesting for embedding code from whatever languages into whatever languages
@jeffkibuule I guess English but sort of halfway between natural language and actual code with logic, API calls, and that sort of thing.
@manton Love this point, I find it true inside and outside of programming languages. It kinda works this way in sales and finance too.
@manton What gets missed is translation of vague requirements to what a computer can do is the actual skill of a software engineer and boy is that actually a skill that depends on talking to humans.
@manton Brings me back to COBOL, which was supposed to be the programming language for the rest of us, as opposed to FORTRAN and assembly language. Then there was BASIC, Smalltalk, and many more, I'm sure. The problem seems to be that only 10% of the general population has a programmer mindset. Generative AI isn't going to change that, alas.