11 Jun One of the options for future software development
Futurologists often name professions that will disappear in the near future. Gartner decided to treat the world of programmers with predictions and published the results of the study. What does the future hold? By 2024, applications with low code content will account for 65% of total orders for new software.
Approximately 75% of businesses will produce their own digital tools, and there are no plans to hire programmers to create these designs. “Holy ground is never empty,” the proverb says, or alternatively, “Nature abhors an empty place.” The place of programmers will be taken by software engineers. The coder profession will be on the list compiled by futurologists.
The pioneers of programming talked to the machine in the language of codes and commands. They used assembler and thought in bits and bytes. Popularization destroys elitism. Making it easier on themselves, programmers developed new programming languages, building up more complex levels of abstraction. The Sort(x) function helped circumvent ignorance of matanalysis and the method of sorting data. Technological evolution led to the simplification of commands. The next logical step would be to abandon them.
The emergence of systems like CASE for automation of software development can be conventionally considered a genie released from a bottle. Webflow platform and Media Lab Scratch programming language allows you to use ready-made logical blocks instead of typing text code. Microsoft Power Apps, Oracle Application Express, Salesforce Lightning Platform and other powerful tools leave little hope. Google, which has acquired the AppSheet platform for developing mobile apps without code, only confirms the status quo.
Development is driven by economics. This rule also works in the case of abandoning code. Businesses are asking for more simple applications, and companies, eager to respond to every customer need, aim to provide them with a simple and easy-to-use utility or service that can instantly accomplish a simple set of tasks, while not requiring the user to have special knowledge. A manager-operator comes out on top. He is able to quickly implement a task, translating it into a ready design, and order the machine to perform the required task.
The time when business will stop investing in training programmers is not far off. Automation will take over their functions. Anyone with basic skills will be able to create codes. They will lose in ease, but gain in simplicity. Perhaps the solutions to the problems will not look as original, but will be simple and reliable. The elegance of the code will become a relic of the past. However, you can hardly do without highly skilled programmers. Somebody has to solve specific tasks.