> Who needs to code when you can use visual building blocks or even plain English to describe intent? Advances in natural-language processing and conceptual modeling will remove the need for traditional coding from app development.

Seriously? This dream died long, long ago. The hard part of software development is not the syntax; it's deciding exactly what you want to happen for every possible input or event.

People who translate are trying to convey meaning. They are not just converting instructions from one language to another. There is intent, emotion, connotation. And you have to do this elegantly. (Everyone who grew up bilingual has spotted clumsy translations.)

I think this article takes a very narrow view of coding. Yet also a fairly common one. If you're one of the people who just wants a machine to do as you tell it, you'll be about as good as coding as someone who cooks in order to not die of starvation.

In order to really master it, just like in any other walk of life, you need passion. You need to have an aesthetic experience, an appreciation for both function and elegance.

You need to find yourself interested in topics that are not directly to hand. You may never need a Bloom Filter or Erlang, but you'll have heard of them and at least placed them on your map of the field.

Getting back to the article and the cooking analogy, better tools will not replace chefs. We have better cooking utensils and machines than 100 years ago. And yes, you need less effort than before to microwave a meal. But chefs still serve a purpose, and you would never mistake a meal made by a guy at home with what a professional chef makes.

>Would I like to type text files for hours a day?

The bulk of my time is spent thinking, not typing.

>Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker?

Programming is a creative job that the author is trying to sound so mundane and boring. Yes, it might not be for everyone, but showing people screenshots of GameSalad Creator, which looks quite scary is not really representative of the vast number of easy-to-use game creators we have today [0].

The fact is that programming is a highly rewarding job (both financially and mentally). As long as there is a demand-supply gap in the industry, people will try to bridge that gap, by whatever methods. Coding academies are just one such method.

If we ever reach parity on the demand/supply situation (or if Universities start training students better), these will be left redundant and new methods would evolve.

[0]: http://www.pixelsham.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/indie-ga...

Stopped reading there, despite predictions this has not happened in the last 20 years and I see no evidence that it will happen in the next 20.

There's also no mention of the thrill of the hunt for the right abstractions - which can be both intellectually and emotionally stimulating.

The less these two factors come into play, the less motivated one would be to sit in front of a computer and click those keys all day long.

If you're set on finding out, and if you require the structure that an academy provides, and you understand the financial implicatios, then don't let this article dissuade you from trying.

Discslaimer: I'm co-founder of http://kitchentablecoders.com and http://sfpc.io

* Would I like to type text files for hours a day? Check.

* Do I enjoy decomposing problems into detailed lists of instructions? Lines of reasoning, but check.

* Am I good at abstract conceptual thinking? Check.

The pool of potential programmers is a lot larger than we might think.

You can self teach (I did), but having structured guidance and someone to answer your questions can get you there faster. I watched my cousin move from novice to gainfully employed via boot camp in a tenth of the time that it took me drilling with a friend nights and weekends.

Even if we take the author's dubious claim that the skills have a shelf life, it's going to be years at minimum before the demand slacks. Plenty of time to earn back the cost of admission with a significantly higher salary.

It is funny that these three questions appear one after the other in the article yet the author doesn't seem to understand the connection or the fallacy of the analogy.

Construction workers don't have to define what a 2x4 is, it simply exists. Translators don't create a new words. The developer has to work simultaneously in the world of the abstract and the concrete; the 2x4 doesn't actually exist in his world, he needs an abstraction to stand in for reality.

Very few people are able to simultaneously juggle both the abstract and the concrete. Which is why the majority of people quit; they do not have a mechanism for these mappings; how to take a requirement, represent it as a series of instructions, through the abstraction of a language.

So yes, academies are nonsense, but by using poor analogies, we simply reinforce the notion that predicated them in the first place.

Whoa, holy shit, if you don't learn new things, you'll stagnate? Who could have guessed? Good point, bro, no one has made that observation ever before and it totally only applies to people who graduate from bootcamps, not to, oh, I dunno, literally any coder in the world.

Know why I like coding bootcamps? Because I left teaching, went to a bootcamp, and doubled my salary. And my job's fun and rewarding and I get to learn stuff constantly and then go home and put that stuff to use on projects that I do for myself.

I think there is a common wrong way of considering programming among non-programmers: customers and people thinks programming is easy, extremely easy but the truth is the opposite. Just try to think how much time does it require to build a simple mobile app or a webapp and how many different knowledges you have to master to do that (front vs server programming languages and frameworks, persistence technologies, deploy tools and so on). And i'm not talking about the complexity of an "enterprise application".

I think this common and misleading sense of easiness is due to the fact that people thinks that you have a lot of work already done thanks to all those opensource libraries, thanks to the ready-to-go tools like wordpress, thanks to all those beautiful and simple programming languages that every child can learn...come on, there is always an easy "build a twitter like app tutorial" so it obviously can't be that complicated thing :D

The truth is that like any other job, you must love programming to do it very well, because programming requires a lot of thinking, designing, studying, patience and perseverance and all these skills are not for everybody.

MY only issue with that approach is people re-inventing the wheel. There is more code on Github than one could imagine, and not enough people evangelizing for Less-lines-of-code.

Of course it may take a programmer two decades to realize this, but what's the phrase:

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few"

I work with code school grads. A perfectly fine set of junior engineers.

if you want to programm pick something you would like to build and work hard. the author of this article did exactly the same, the difference is that he did it long before you.

The author seems to not understand what coding is (despite his 15 years of experience as being repeated several time, as if to make it true maybe). Coding is not just building a stupid app, coding is not translating English into some weird language. The language of choice in programming is just a detail, anyone can learn a syntax in a couple days. The real challenge is in the understanding and the modeling of the problems, the design of the solution to have all the pieces fit together.

1. The message that automated tools will replace text based coding has been repeated every decade since text based programming languages were invented. Visual programming has found it's niches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language but somehow I'm still producing new code in C++ - and not only due to historical baggage of large organizations (while it does have a considerable part to play as well)

2. The view that visual programming will take the hard parts away from coding is highly misleading. It applies only to the stupid parts were one needs to connect input to output b as nauseam. On the large scale it will still be about systems design, and on the individual operand level about understanding, designing and debugging algorithms.

I understood the last point very strongly when observing my 8 year old progressing with his hobby programming in Scratch. At first he was quite flabbergasted at what to do with all of the blocks - then he followed some examples, but was still baffled. After a while when my wife found a book about Scratch programming for him (we're not native english speakers so it's not as trivial as it sounds) he was extatic that he found all these examples that finally explained to him how he could implement things.

But the thing is - he's not copying the examples verbatim, he parses the examples in his head, then figures out a new interesting variation of the technique with his own art and then implements it.

Clearly he has skills far beyond simply "connecting wires". The blocks take the tedium of parsing and compiler errors away but the algorithms he needs to still implement himself.

And the familiar categories of bugs are present there still. "Why is not my spaceship moving - Oh, I'm initializing this variable inside the loop and not just before it" - a simple mouse drag - and suddenly the space ship he drew is flying across the screen.

I just looked at the commit log for my current project, https://github.com/bjwbell/gensimd/commits/master (SIMD in Go), and ~90% of the commits are boring. I still feel very excited about it, perhaps I'm unbalanced.

If you find that creative then you can find anything in your life creative, even shopping.

And I must agree 90% time tasks are mundane but for the 10%, it is worth doing.

Sure if you're coming up with cutting edge machine algorithms or coming up with the product features or designs that you're then going to implement, there might be a great deal of creativity involved. But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager. There is nothing "creative" about fixing a bug, adding a new feature to a website (that you didn't design yourself), streamlining your deployment process, or reducing the latency on your server.

As a software engineer, the one thing I dislike about my job is the lack of creativity, which is why I find myself pursuing arts in my free time (eg. video game design, music).

I don't think coding academies or the people in them would argue that you could become a great developer in a few weeks or even a year.

The other day I was talking to a friend who is doing one of the better reputation coding academies in NYC. She's learned a lot but also realizes how much more there is to learn, and she's also gone from knowing very little to understanding that coding academies operate primarily in one, high-level part of the tech stack. Over time she'll keep learning but she does have a job as a junior developer—which means someone, somewhere thinks she knows enough to be productive. AFAICT, that's what coding academies offer.

Which is, I suppose, what you say here:

The fact is that programming is a highly rewarding job (both financially and mentally). As long as there is a demand-supply gap in the industry, people will try to bridge that gap, by whatever methods. Coding academies are just one such method.

Sorry, I should have been less succinct - I totally agree with you, visual languages already exist and are improving all the time. I don't believe that they will lead to a world without programmers for the reasons you state. They are just another way to express syntax, they don't reduce the complexity of the actual problem being solved.