
THE LIFE OF AN INDUSTRIALISED PROGRAMMER
The Life of an Industrialised Programmer From women's work to disposable human infrastructure. 1843: Ada Lovelace imagines a world of computation before the machine even exists. 1940s: Programming is often classified as women's work. Women develop algorithms, operate early computers and solve problems nobody has solved before. Management frequently treats it as clerical labour. 1950s–60s: Grace Hopper helps revolutionise programming languages. Margaret Hamilton helps put humans on the Moon. Software is suddenly recognised as critical engineering. The profession gains prestige. The gatekeepers arrive. 1970s–80s: Computing becomes institutionalised. The programmer becomes a professional identity. Computers are increasingly marketed to boys. 1990s: The great object-oriented industrial revolution. Objects need factories. Factories need interfaces. Interfaces need architects. Architects need managers. Managers need meetings. Somewhere in the process, the original problem disappears beneath the abstractions. 2000s: The software factory. Agile. Scrum. Stand-ups. Sprints. Story points. Velocity. The programmer becomes an interchangeable unit of delivery capacity. Human intelligence, measured in Jira tickets. 2010s: The cloud cathedral. Microservices. Containers. Kubernetes. YAML. DevOps. Entire teams maintain infrastructure for software nobody fully understands anymore. Production fails at 3 AM. The programmer wakes up. Management calls it ownership. 2020s: The final industrial insult. After decades of reducing programmers to mechanical units of production, the industry announces that machines can now perform their mechanical tasks. The executives celebrate. The programmer develops back pain. The AI generates code. The enterprise generates meetings. The production incident still requires a human. And somewhere, another Jira ticket is born. THEN COMES THE REVELATION. An exhausted programmer discovers Erlang. A language developed back in the 1980s. Processes. Message passing. Isolation. Supervision. Recovery. He reads Joe Armstrong. "Let it crash." Twenty years of enterprise architecture suddenly flash before his eyes. It was there all along. The alternative wasn't waiting to be invented. It was waiting to be understood. And that's the tragedy. The pioneers of computing were exploring the foundations of computation itself. The industrialised programmer inherited factories, frameworks, methodologies and an infinite backlog. We confused industrialising software production with advancing computer science. Now we're industrialising intelligence itself. Perhaps it's time we returned to the foundations. The programmer closes Jira. Opens Erlang. And begins again. The supervision tree is alive. The realm is locked. THE VERIFIED SURVIVE. #Programming #SoftwareEngineering #WomenInComputing #Erlang #JoeArmstrong #BEAM #AI #ComputerScience #DistributedSystems #DamageBDD























