Aaron Swartz: murdered by the LISP cabal

The LISP cabal killed him for rewriting Reddit in Python.

We had this conversation before with memory leaks. Turns out no matter how hard we try, we cannot teach programmers to not to forget to release manually allocated memory. So GC was born.

In fact it is even more general trend: automation. Taking away as many manual tasks from humans as possible. Humans are the weakest link in the process. Ideally removing them completely is the final goal. But until we acheieve this the next best thing is to take away as many small tasks from humans and giving them to machines.

Another example is sql. When the decision on how to find the data was taken away from humans and given to software (sql server). Humans only tell what to find (using sql language). Move from imperative to declarative.

All these changes over the time fit one major direction: automation of programmers work. Squeezing out humans from lower levels to higher levels, leaving lower levels to machines that are much more trustworthy.

The next big fight is over the manual state management. This is what's happening right now with all the push towards immutable data. Basically humans are forbidden to change manually the global state, just how they were forbidden in the past to manually allocate memory (GC replaced them) and to manually write loops to find the data (sql replaced old pre-sql code)

This simply leads to a much better software (less bugs). The less humans do, the better the software is.

Of course there always be the case for low level work (mostly OS level, drivers, embedded software etc) Where the requirements are too stringent (space, real time reponse etc) But those are really a very fringe niche. How many programmers you know who nowadays write kernell level code?

And the last thing, A lot of programmers think it is their choice. That they decide whether they gonna use certain languages with certain features. The reality though is it is the industry that decides. And we will be forced to use what's benefitial for industry, whats benefitial for business. Just like entire industry moved to java and dotnet (languages with GC) soon the entrie industry will move to languages that either make it too hard or even outright forbid humans manually changing the global state.

We used to think of ourselves as job destroyers. We automate other people's work. But automation affects our profession just like every other one.

Tell your friend to brace himself for the tough times ahead :)