Infographic 11 · D3 · Aliens block
Every one of these removed work people used to do by hand, and every one was described at the time as the end of a kind of programmer. Each moved that programmer up instead.
The bunching after 1995 is the only quantitative claim here, and an evenly spaced axis would have hidden it. The gap between leaps has been getting shorter, which says nothing about whether the next one is different in kind.
| Year | Leap | Removed | The job moved to |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1949 | The stored program | toggling machine code by hand | writing symbolic assembly |
| 1957 | The compiler | hand written assembly | expressing the algorithm |
| 1968 | Structured programming | arbitrary jumps | designing control flow |
| 1972 | C and portable Unix | one rewrite per machine | designing portable interfaces |
| 1995 | Managed runtimes | manual memory | modelling the domain |
| 2006 | Cloud | procuring a server | designing for elasticity |
| 2011 | Continuous integration | checking by hand before release | deciding what a gate blocks on |
| 2013 | Containers | it works on my machine | owning the whole artifact |
| 2023 | Models that write code | typing the implementation | verifying what came back |
The last row is the one under argument. Generation got cheap much faster than verification did, and that gap is what makes evaluation the expensive half rather than the chore at the end.
Campaign day 82, which closes the Aliens block. The written piece is in the writing index.