I think with your mechanic analogy, you can look at as any idiot can plug something in to a computer to see what's going wrong. So you're always going to have people that can put pre-done bits of code together to make a program.

However, as with any profession, there are always going to be those who are the craftsmen. The fellow that does the Woodwright's Workshop on public television here in the states springs to mind. You've got someone using primitive tools to produce items in wood. If you gave those to the average Joe or Jane on the street, you'd get sawdust.

So there's always going to be a need for the craftsmen whether it's engineering or programming.

As far as anyone being able to design software, don't we have that now with things such as Visual Basic? I know Turbo Pascal played a big part in that perhaps 10-15 years ago. But just by the amount of shareware that's available, and that was even available 10-15 years ago shows that's already happened. Somehow I doubt people are going to spend hours upon hours doing assembly code to produce a program that they *hope* to get someone to pay $10-20 for.

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.