I started coding at a very young age, a rather long time ago. I had my first paid job one summer writing a basic program for my father when I was just 17 years old. Before that I had taken a Basic programming class at age 16 and before that I would log into USC Tenex and run a basic program, access email and do other things. I was 12 years of age and the year was 1977. For this I would use a primitive modem with rubber phone cups, using the family rotary dial telephone, and a special terminal to log in from my home near Los Angeles. The first terminal we used did not even have a screen, the "screen" was a VERY NOISY dot matrix printer that screamed along printing everything that, both, I typed and then the USC mainframe returned back from the USC campus, located across town from our Palos Verdes Estates hill top home. My father had brought this "mobile" computer terminal home one day that used an early dot-matric printer that would print page after page. The printer was the literally the computer monitor.
USC Tenex Tops was one of the first five computers from what began as a DOD funded research project that had come out of the Rand Corporation, located a few miles from my first home, with connections to UCLA, my birthplace. This small, 5 computer Rand sourced network was an experiment meant to survive a full scale nuclear attack by Russia allowing for continued communication in the aftermath of such a terrible event. This little network would later be renamed to the cryptic and odd sounding "Internet".
After a failed first software company attempt, at age 16, creatively named TSC which stood for The Software Company, I went one morning for my first job interview as an application developer. I was 20 years old and this would be my first software work outside of the home at a company just a few miles away. The year was 1985. This small manufacturing outfit located down the hill from my home in Torrance California built an oil spill containment product used by the oil companies called "SeaCurtain". They were looking to hire someone to “show them" how to run their brand new IBM personal computer. Application developer had not really crept into the social vocabulary yet and the president of the company in question felt that they just needed someone to show them a few key presses to get started. The company owner, a friend of my father, Mr. Kepner, owner and operator of the Kepner Plastics company, sold the SeaCurtain product to oil companies to float on top of the water and contain leaking crude oil in a circle in the ocean until it could be sucked up from the water (or something like that.)
I remember walking into my new office and seeing that beautiful, brand new shiny IBM PC humming away. It was so clean and elegant, sitting there, on, what was about to become my desk. In order to land the job, all I had to do was to type in a few DOS commands, run the limited software that it had available, and install Forth, a new programming language that I was learning. Luckily, I had remembered to bring the right 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. The managers hung over watching in awe and hummed in a quiet chorus: "We only know how to turn the thing on".
After this day, I would roll out of bed each morning and putt my VW rabbit eagerly to work. I could hardly believe my luck: I was getting unlimited free coffee and being paid money to do what I loved to do in my spare time: develop computer software. Plenty of money for all the Ramen soups and Taco Bell Taco Salads that I could eat! The pretty secretaries would all go home at 5 o'clock, but I did not want to leave. Surprisingly, the owner, who had astutely put me on a fixed salary, did not mind. He had no problem with me working late into the evening. Typically, I would drive home at about 9:00 PM, with my eyes feeling that monochrome burn, from staring at that green, single color monitor all day.
This made the head lights of my car glow with a reddish hue reflecting light off the ground. White light, all light, had developed a reddish glow to it. This went away after a few hours. On my second drive home, seeing this pink reddish color reflecting off the ground ahead of my car from my normally all white headlights, I concluded that this was due to the fact that red is the opposite color to green. My brain was beginning to adapt to the color green by turning everything a little red.
As I was now a man of income I was able to join a local gym. Working out one night at my new gym, a man approached and asked me what I did for myself when he was surprised to discover that my father had not bought my membership. I was 20 years old, but I looked like all of 17. I told him proudly that I was a computer programmer. He said oh, and then proceeded to inform me, speaking expertly, that I would not have my job for very much longer. When I innocently asked him why, he explained that in a few years you will just talk into a box that you hold in your hand, tell it what programs you needed and it will do all that for you. I said, oh. Then, while doing my arm curls in the mirror, I could see myself going into welding. The year was now 1986. Despite this set back, I continued on with my programming efforts.
Fast forward 38 years and now everyone is saying AI is going to take over programming. "You don't have to write code any more, the smart AI thingy will do it all for you!" I hear things like, “No code AI is taking over!” Fortunately, for me, I have managed to maintain my welding skills. I will hang in there as long as I can with programming, before quantum computing AI takes over everything, and, hell, we even work for one big machine that gives us all our daily work tasks and living activities.
Perhaps these people have mistakenly adopted the adage: two dummies are better then one smart person. Unfortunately, intelligence is a bit like heat where the second law of thermodynamics applies: you cannot multiply heat to achieve a higher value due to the irreversible nature of energy. The process path of heat only goes from higher to lower. A pot of boiling water added to another pot with the same temperature water does not develop 200 degrees Celsius water. They would join together and remain at the same temperature.
Programming is an art and a science requiring that someone apply a tool, computer, to solve a problem, for example keeping track of personal information and managing 10k account balances. Code is nomenclature, it means a library of words and symbols that abstract functional processes into a dictionary of entries. Code is not technical, but the programming language is a technical tool requiring thoughtful and careful application.
The bottom line is: computers will help us to program faster, but we humans still need to decide what the computer is to accomplish and this takes time and patiences to work out. A computer could perhaps do some of that for us, but we would still need to spend time in the field doing research, speaking with potential users, trying different methods and ultimately developing a tool to fill a need. That is what a software program is: a specialized tool developed to integreate into a complex environment.
If that is your cup of tea, I have a treat for everyone who is not a full time, professional welder, or has not yet succumbed to becoming a whatever you must practice during your regular daytime employment jobs (actually, I do enjoy welding). If you are someone who would like a somewhat easier pathway in developing your own web applications then this may be for you. Gather around, my fellow code writers, I present to you the project for which I have waited for my entire life to be borne, that would give me one universal application building tool, using a system that relieved me of the tedium and the details that should perhaps already be automatically done for us. I present to you: Ignition!
Alright, yes, its another open source project and, if you don't want to write code, it is probably not for you (maybe you should just go pay someone to convert your nocode AI project ideas into useful sourcecode). However, if you know a little PHP and SQL and can hoist up a basic web server, then perhaps this could be a great help to you in your software development efforts. I invite you to check out my project for yourself. It is, again, open source, completely free of charge, and located on Gitlab. You may find it here:
Ignition builds off of the wonderful CodeIgniter development framework. For me it adds the basic functional elements that I generally build into all applications. User management and logins, a blog, easy to add and customize web pages, automatic javascript field data recall (auto form), an assortment of premade menus, standard header, body and footer designs, an abstracted web layout class, and an interesting autoform system that allows on to add-in an entire MVC (Model View Control) with database in less than an hour.
I think that Ignition is a great tool for developing web applications and, if you are looking for something to get going using CodeIgniter, then this is probably an excellent choice to get started working with that outstanding framework. You will have a complete website up in a short amount of time, and you can quickly add to it and customize it to your heart's content. So, if you are in any of these categories, then check it out. It is completely free and you are welcome to use it as an open source tool to assist you in your non welding type endeavors.
Cheers!