The future of computer science on TWiT
Just listened to This Week In Tech, episode 149. About an hour in, the panel took a brief break from trading Bill Gates stories and got into a discussion of the future of computers and the science thereof. Jerry Pournelle predicted that in three or four years, computers will have 64 cores and virtually infinite computing power, memory, and storage capacity. As a result, softwares’ strain on hardware will become a nonissue and…
“The people who are going to make money are the ones who are going to figure out how a guy who knows how to do something useful and doesn’t care about computer science can sit down and teach the damn machine to do something useful without having to spend four years learning to program.”
Jerry Pournelle
Good food for thought, to say the least. As a prospective computer science student, this both fascinates and worries me. On the one hand, the engineer in me is excited by the thought of creating this kind of uniformly-accessible development environment, but I also worry that if this were to come true, a degree in computer engineering would be worth that much less. I agree that programming and software development is currently somewhat of a walled garden. Anyone unwilling to spend countless hours learning the semantics and logic of seemingly meaningless code is left dependent on the output of those who are. However, it’s this specialization and difficulty of craft that leads to engineers’ high salaries. Cognitive dissonance FTL.
This week’s TWiT is definitely worth a listen, if this kind of thing interests you. They had some interesting things to say regarding natural language programming, too. It’s refreshing to FINALLY listen to an episode where they don’t spend 45 minutes talking about Twitter.