Uncle Bob - The Long Reach of Code, Automating Programming, and Developing Coding Talent

Okay. Today, I'm talking with Robert Martin, who needs no introduction. So let's begin with talking about the future of programming. Will GPT-25 be able to automate programming? Will I not have a job in 25 years?

What is GPT-25? What is that?

G-, uh, GPT-3 is the program that OpenAI just released, and it seems to be able to do some basic... make some basic methods, like making a palindrome, 'cause they just did deep learning over a bunch of GitHub repositories. So is the future of AI basically gonna be able to automate programming?

No. (laughs) Pretty, pretty straightforward answer. There's, there's a, a fundamental reason behind this. Um, in order to, um, finally replicate programming, if you wanted a machine that could program like a human, that machine would have to have human sentience, and we are very, very, v- far away from that kind of a machine. Why would we need human sentience? Because someone has to specify the, the way the program is going to work, and that specification is, in fact, the program. No other specification will suffice. So a business user comes along, and he, he, he creates a rough specification but is depending on the human intuition and the human intelligence of the programmers to fill in all the horrible little blanks that the, uh, the business person omitted. We programmers are detail managers. We deal with all the mess. We, we're the ones who deal with the fact that text files sometimes, uh, terminate lines with backslash N but sometimes terminate lines with backslash N backslash R for reasons that go back 50 years because of teletypes and Unix and DOS and all this crap. And we're the ones writing the dumb little if statements to deal with the bizarre little exceptions that no business person wants to even think about. If we tried to make a, a mach- a deep learning machine (laughs) that could deal with all that stuff, we would wind up with a HAL 9000, something that has human intelligence, and, and we are so far away from that that, uh, it does not concern me in the slightest that some, some deep learning machine will eventually take over all the programmers' jobs.

I'm happy to hear that then. But how about this, uh, potential, which is that the development environments and the tools that programmers use will become so advanced that it'll be almost like a symbiotic pair programming kind of assignment, where, uh, you know, you're, you're working with the machine to write the code instead of just, like, writing it on the machine?

Sure. I mean, that, we've already had that for, for, for the entire span of programming, we've been doing that. I mean, the original programs were written in binary, right? So Alan Turing, working on the, uh, the automated computing engine, was literally writing things in binary 'cause th- there were no languages. And then eventually, we made an assembler. Can you imagine the benefit of an assembler over binary? All that horrible binary math that you had to do, you don't have to do anymore, and you can write your code in symbolic form. That's already a huge advantage. And then along comes John Backus with the Fortran spec in 1953, and what a huge advantage that was over assembly language. ALGOL came along pretty quickly. By 1966, you've got Ola Johan Dahl and Christian Nygaard inventing objects. This is, you know, 20 years after Alan Turing was doing binary programming, you've got the first object-oriented language. C comes along in '68, two years later. C++ comes along 12 years after that. And we've got this massive progression of, of incredible amounts of help to the programmer. Then in the, in the late '90s, we start getting this wild stuff in our tools, the IntelliSense and the refactoring tools and the inspectors and the duplication finders, so that a modern IDE is a treasure trove of, of tools that allow a programmer to do immensely more complex things than we used to be able to do. So yes, I hope that machine learning continues to make our tools more powerful, but that will never alleviate the need for the programmer to be there and supervise those tools. I'm a pilot. I fly a plane. The plane has a beautiful autopilot. I can turn it on, and the plane will fly itself all the way to my destination, and I watch that thing like a hawk 'cause it's a, a machine, and it's gonna do the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. So I sit there, and I watch that autopilot, and every time it's supposed to do something, I make sure it does that thing. I'm still in charge. It's not. (laughs)