in reply to (OT) Programming as a craft
I don't believe that there is any danger of programming as a profession vanishing any time soon. Here are my two main reasons for thinking so.
First, I don't believe that the 'automation' you refer to will arrive as quickly as you think. Now, granted, people are always coming up with better and faster ways of perfroming programming tasks. Does anyone remember carrying around big boxes full of cards to be fed into a card-reader to enter your program into the machine? Long gone and good riddance. Through programming someone mated a tv(sic) with the proper software to replace that process. But that was a mechanical process and (fairly) easy to 'automate'. And even that process is still expanding and improving. I think it will be a very long time before you can hand a machine even the simplest specification which the machine can read and know what you want.
Secondly, programming is one of those fields which is constantly expanding into new areas of human endeavor. Think of the parts of human life that computers touch now in some form that they were not thought of even ten years ago. How many of us drive a car that has a computer in it? How many of us carry a computer around with one hand? And how long will it be before we talk to our sleeve to order our computer to do something?
The point I am clumsily trying to make is that computer uses are constantly expanding. Creating the software and programs they use requires human judgement. And human judgement, feeble as it can be, is not going to be replaced any time soon.
xenchu