I was going to brush up on my COBOL, but maybe not:
In this new computer science—if we even call it computer science at all—the machines will be so powerful and already know how to do so many things that the field will look like less of an engineering endeavor and more of an an educational one; that is, how to best educate the machine
Matt Welsh, “The End of Programming“
On the other hand, isn’t “educating the machine” what we’ve been doing all along?
hmm… this reminds me of “the education of a computer” by Grace Hopper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/609784.609818
>The programmer may return to being a mathematician. He is supplied with a catalogue of subroutines. No longer does he need to have available formulas or tables of elementary functions. He does not even need to know the particular instruction code used by the computer. He needs only to be able to use the catalogue to supply information to the computer about his problem.
Still, as for
>the earliest pioneers of computer science, emerging from the (relatively) primitive cave of electrical engineering
this doesn’t seem to line up with the history I’m aware of, particularly considering Turing’s comments on the skills future programmers would need, something like “mathematicians of great ability and discipline”.