From women's work to disposable human infrastructure.
- The beginning.
Ada Lovelace looks at a machine and imagines a universe of computation.
The machine hasn't even been built.
The programmer already exists.
1940s. Programming is women's work.
Women calculate trajectories, wire machines, devise algorithms and make early computers useful.
The men build the hardware. The women make it compute.
Management calls much of it clerical work.
The women are solving problems nobody has solved before.
Naturally, the wages and recognition don't always reflect that.
1950s–1960s. The great revelation.
Grace Hopper helps make programming languages practical.
Margaret Hamilton's team helps put humans on the Moon.
The industry discovers that software isn't clerical decoration.
It's the bloody machine's intelligence.
Suddenly, programming is becoming a profession.
Credentials arrive. Departments arrive. Hierarchies arrive.
The job starts acquiring status, and the gatekeepers become increasingly interested in who qualifies.
1970s–1980s. The professional programmer.
Computer science becomes an institution.
The personal computer enters the home. Marketing increasingly presents the computer enthusiast as a boy.
The programmer becomes a cultural identity.
The industry discovers something more valuable than a computer.
A human being who will voluntarily spend eighteen hours fighting one.
1990s. The object-oriented industrial revolution.
The programmer enters the enterprise.
Everything becomes an object.
Objects require factories.
Factories require interfaces.
Interfaces require architects.
Architects require meetings.
Meetings require managers.
And managers require another layer of architecture to explain why nothing works.
The programmer is no longer solving a problem.
He's maintaining a civilisation of abstractions.
2000s. The software factory.
Agile arrives.
Stand-ups. Sprints. Velocity. Story points.
Every programmer becomes an interchangeable unit of delivery capacity.
The revolutionary idea of computing has been reduced to moving rectangles across Jira.
The programmer's intellectual life is now measured in tickets closed.
2010s. The cloud cathedral.
Microservices. Containers. Kubernetes. YAML. DevOps.
The programmer spends a decade building elaborate infrastructure to run a function that could once have fitted on a page.
He no longer understands the whole system.
Nobody does.
But everybody has a dashboard.
Production fails at 3 AM.
The programmer wakes up.
The company calls this ownership.
2020s. The final industrial insult.
After decades of turning programmers into mechanical units, the industry announces that machines can now perform their mechanical tasks.
Congratulations!
The programmer has successfully automated the very abstraction of labour into which he was forced.
The company celebrates.
The programmer develops back pain.
The AI generates code.
The enterprise generates meetings.
The production incident still requires a human.
And somewhere, a Jira ticket is born.
THE REVELATION.
An exhausted programmer, twenty years into the industry, encounters Erlang.
A language that has been around since the 1980s.
Processes. Messages. Isolation. Supervision. Recovery.
He reads Joe Armstrong.
"Let it crash."
He looks back at twenty years of enterprise architecture.
Twenty years of pretending that sufficiently elaborate software can eliminate failure.
And he understands.
The tragedy wasn't that industrial programming existed.
The tragedy was that the industry confused industrialising software production with advancing the science of computation.
The women who helped pioneer computing weren't merely typing instructions.
They were exploring the foundations.
Somewhere along the road, the profession acquired prestige, bureaucracy, factories, managers, methodologies and now probabilistic code generators.
And forgot to teach the next generation what computation actually is.
The programmer closes Jira.
Opens Erlang.
And begins again.
THE SUPERVISION TREE IS ALIVE.
THE REALM IS LOCKED.
THE VERIFIED SURVIVE.
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