The Long Climb: Seventy Years of Raising the Level of Abstraction
Every era of programming has been an argument about the same thing. How much of the work should the human do, and how much should we hand to the machine? Each time we have answered “give more to the machine,” someone has objected that the machine cannot be trusted with it, that real programmers work closer to the metal, and that the new convenience is a toy. And each time, within a decade, the convenience has become the floor that the next generation of programmers stands on without a second thought. This is a story about that floor rising. It runs from a woman feeding subroutines to a UNIVAC on tape in 1952 to a teenager in 2026 building a working web application by describing it to a language model in English. The technologies could not look more different. The motive behind them is identical. ...