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The numbers inside parentheses are relevance scores. Scoring is based, in order of priority, on title, category, content and tags. The higher the score, the more likely that post relates to this post. ]]> After the nearly complete disappointment of Launch 2010 Boston, I had given serious thought to not going to the MSDN Northeast Roadshow stop in Augusta, ME on Tuesday, May 11. I figured it would be little more than a regurgitation of what happened at last month’s event.

I’m glad I decided to go. What a huge difference.

In  half the time, Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen provided immeasurably more valuable and interesting information about Visual Studio 2010 and changes to Silverlight, multithreading, ASP.NET and an overview of Windows Phone 7. Here’s a recap.

Jim O'Neil describes Silverlight 4's new video / webcam support features.

Silverlight 4: Lately, listening to Microsoft describe a new Web technology brings to mind the phrase “a day late and a dollar short.” That’s certainly the case with Silverlight 4.

Admittedly, Microsoft has shifted the emphasis behind Silverlight to be less a clone of Flash and more an extension to the Web of Windows Presentation Foundation. But the “new features” O’Neil described on Tuesday were very much old technologies for Flash, and pretty much obsolete tech given HTML5.

Specifically, Silverlight 4 supports Web cams and microphones; TCP/UDP; printing; and a multiple-trust-level model that includes access to the file system, cross-domain requests and COM integration. Additionally, the XAML one writes to render Silverlight, while still different from WPF XAML, is a lot more like WPF.

Silverlight is, therefore, weaker than Flash and stronger than it at the same time. But it seems mostly moot, given that Flash itself is falling out of favor in response to the HTML5 specification’s API support for audio, video and other complex objects. Admittedly, there are things one can do in Silverlight — namely, presenting stored data and integrating existing COM components, such as text-to-speech or an interface to a proprietary business object / program — that one cannot do directly in HTML5.

That seems to me more likely to matter when making a corporate intranet or the like. I didn’t see much hope for Silverlight when it was introduced in 2007, and I still don’t see a future for it.

Parallel Programming: I admit I’m not as up-to-speed as I should be with parallel programming, largely because 99 out of 100 things I program are Web apps. So maybe Bowen’s presentation on .NET 4′s revisions to multithreading aren’t that exciting, but I found them fascinating.

One of the most interesting things .NET does is employ local work-stealing queues. In other words, each thread can queue, specific to it, tasks to perform; but if a neighboring thread has nothing to do, it can reach into that other thread’s queue and process the job, too. Basically, that means optimizing each thread to work almost constantly, which is, of course, a wholesale improvement in processing efficiency.

A couple of neat tricks Bowen showed that can be easily integrated into a current .NET project are Parallel.For and Parallel.Invoke. Parallel.For effectively lets you multithread a standard for loop; Parallel.Invoke lets you multithread a series of method / function calls.

ASP.NET 4 and Windows Azure: Once again, I get the feeling that Microsoft is a bit behind the times when it comes to Web development technologies. And while integrating Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service, into Web development is pretty progressive, the rest of the improvements to ASP.NET, especially Web forms, is more fixing things that were broken than making things better.

Notable in ASP.NET 4 Web forms is the ability to disable viewstate at the page level, but enable it on a per-control level; previously, one could disable viewstate for a specific control while enabling it on the page level.

IIS 7 also more closely integrates the ASP.NET engine, so that services such as membership can be extended to plain HTML pages.

Web forms also has a slightly improved client-side naming convention for rendered controls, but in all honesty, it’s still a mess to address, via JavaScript, individual elements of, say, a GridView.

Dynamic Data sites are improved by adding EntityDataSource to the list of available data sources; and the MVC aspects of ASP.NET have been improved, although a lack of time prevented O’Neil from getting into them in detail.

He did have an opportunity to briefly go over using Azure to host both the application and data for a Web site, which looks interesting; but given how cheap Web hosting is, and that most Web apps can happily live on a shared hosting solution, or on a third-hand server that would otherwise be junked, I don’t see Azure Web programming being of much use to most folks.

Windows Phone 7: Due to previous presentations running long, Bowen ran short of time to talk about Windows Phone 7; I think “abortive” is a good one-word description of how this presentation went.

Fortunately, Windows Phone 7 won’t hit the market until Christmas time, so maybe he’ll get another crack at it before then. Until then, check out developer.windowsphone.com to get the tools (including an emulator), see tutorials, etc.

Swag And Final Thoughts: This event included the same T-shirt and VS 2010 Ultimate trial disc as Launch 2010 Boston, but an upgraded notebook and pen. I declined them. But I did win an awesome, insulated lunch bag at the end of the event:

The "Heroes Happen Here" lunch bag I won at the end of the May 11, 2010 MSDN Northeast Roadshow event in Augusta.

Note the “Heroes Happen Here” tag, which indicates this was a giveaway related to the VS 2008 / Windows Server 2008 / SQL Server 2008 launch. Oh, the irony.

I swear my shining opinion of this Roadshow event has nothing to do with winning the lunch bag. Statistically speaking, it was difficult not to win; I’d put the ratio of prizes to people at 4-1. The giveaways included two copies of VS 2010 Professional, several Windows mobile mouses, books, totes and other very cool stuff.

So yes, it’s nice to have won something cool (no pun intended), but it’s far better to have had my time rewarded with useful information. This event really renewed my faith in MSDN support for developers and took a lot of the sting out of the disappointment of Launch 2010 Boston.

Let’s hope Microsoft continues to support the Northeast Roadshow for a long time to come, because it is, by far, the most valuable resource I’ve found for learning about Microsoft tools and technologies.

Materials and Links: You can get the Powerpoints O’Neil and Bowen used at http://tinyurl.com/NERDShow0510. Eventually, screencasts will be available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/northeast.

I recommend joining the Northeast Roadshow’s Facebook group. But remember, group Wall posts aren’t included in your news stream, so you have to physically go to the group’s page to see what’s happening.

All links in this post on delicious: http://delicious.com/dougvdotcom/msdn-northeast-roadshow-augusta-me-may-11-2010-recap

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The numbers inside parentheses are relevance scores. Scoring is based, in order of priority, on title, category, content and tags. The higher the score, the more likely that post relates to this post. ]]> Now that I’m a day or so removed from the Visual Studio “Launch 2010″ event in Boston, have plenty of sleep under my belt, and the benefit of hindsight, I’d like to recap my impressions.

I still consider Launch 2010 a significant disappointment, especially compared to the “Heroes Happen Here” launch of Visual Studio 2008 / SQL Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 that was held in Manchester, NH, two years ago. But I should explain why, and maybe at least put in context, if not rephrase, my criticisms of Thursday.

Attendance: I need to clarify my attendance estimates from Thursday.

I’m guessing there were about 1,000 people in attendance at Launch 2010, which had three tracks: two all-day tracks for developers and IT professionals, and a half-day track for managers / decision makers. Of the total number of attendees, well over half  — at least 500 — were in the developer track. I don’t have an exact count because I don’t know who to ask for one, and I doubt there is an accurate count in any event, because Microsoft was allowing walk-ins throughout the event.

However many people were there, it was too many, at least for the developer track. They ran out of seats by 9:30 AM and it only got worse until 3:30 PM, after the ASP.NET session, after which a large number of people left. I did pop in on the IT pro track, after I couldn’t regain my seat following lunch; there were a few empty seats available there.

Allowing such a significant overflow is a huge kick in the balls. I took the time to register ahead of time. I took great pains to ensure I would arrive on time. If you’re letting people filter in six hours after they were supposed to show up, you’re not being fair to me — especially if I can’t fully enjoy the event.

To me, this is straightforward: If you want people to come and go at their pleasure, don’t bother with preregistration.

Otherwise, start the event on time. If, say, 100 preregistered guests don’t show up, then allow 100 walk-ins to attend — and make them wait for a break, just like if they walked in late to a play or opera. In other words, Microsoft, have respect for the people who demonstrated their interest and sincerity by taking pains to follow the preregistration requirement and honor the schedule.

There were a lot of people at Heroes Happen Here, too; several hundred people went to the developer track. But I don’t recall people having to sit on the floor, or losing my seat, or being swept away by a human wave every time there was a break.

Event staff and organization: The event staff was friendly, but their organization was awful.

I registered for the developer track. When I checked in, I received the developer track evaluation form. But my name tag said I was in the IT professional track, and the agenda they gave me was for the IT decision maker track. As I noted previously, lots of us got the wrong agenda, which — coupled with the hotel serving lunch early — caused a mixup that helped to ruin an already boring seminar on SharePoint.

When I asked for the proper agenda, immediately after the first seminar ended (about two hours after the event started), they told me they had run out.

At Heroes Happen Here, I received all the proper materials. It appears Microsoft used the same contractor to manage both events (CRG Events), so how things got so messed up is beyond me.

The hotel and its staff: As I said before, the Westin Copley Place is a very nice hotel. And the hotel staff was excellent, from the housekeepers to the managers.

Trash was policed often (which was critical, given the mess created by soda cans, coffee cups, plastic cups, bag lunches and a bunch of worthless papers shoved into the event packet); the management was constantly checking with event staff, and on their own accord, to ensure things were going well; I did not see or hear a single problem related to the facility.

The food served was excellent and plentiful. Even the coffee — Starbucks — was of considerably better quality than one normally encounters at a continental breakfast.

The Radisson in Manchester, NH is also a nice hotel and also had a good staff, but it’s the difference between a Camry and a Maybach.

The swag: Yes, much of my disappointment is with Microsoft not offering fully functional copies of Visual Studio 2010. And I don’t think it’s too much to ask, in exchange for giving them my audience for eight hours and evangelizing on their behalf, to get a useful copy of the thing they’re flogging.

At Heroes Happen Here, they not only gave away copies of VS 2008 Professional, they also gave away a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and evaluation copies of Windows Server 2008. Additionally, because SQL Server 2008 wasn’t ready by the time of Heroes Happen Here, Microsoft sent us, later, fully functional copies of SQL Server 2008 Standard.

I really have to believe that the same could have been done here. At best, Microsoft shouldn’t set an expectation like this and not follow through later. Or, they should state in the event FAQ that evaluation software only will be distributed, rather than saying that “information is not available at this time.”

The Heroes Happen Here software offering generated tremendous amounts of goodwill, at least from me. Launch 2010′s paltry 90-day evaluation disc, and the Desktop Optimization disc (PDF file) that I’ve already thrown in the trash, pretty much destroyed that goodwill in a fell swoop.

I’m not saying Microsoft needed to be as generous with software now as it was then. I would have been happy just getting a copy of VS 2010 Professional. I am saying that having three copies of VS 2010 Ultimate to give away, via drawing, to well over 500 people is actually counterproductive; it just rubs salt in the wound.

The presentations: Microsoft hires interesting and smart people to promote and support its products. It’s always great to hear from Chris Bowen, Jim O’Neil and Bob Familiar. And the remaining presenters — I’d tell you who they were, but I didn’t take notes at the time and I don’t have the right agenda to review — were affable and knowledgeable.

The keynote was a marketing pitch, plain and simple. The first session, on application lifecycle management, was entertaining but thin on practical examples. And the first SharePoint presentation was heavy on details about integrating old ASP.NET Web form applications, and completely deficient on Office programming.

Which was made more amusing since about three people, again out of about 500, held up their hands when the presenter asked who works in SharePoint. I was not one of them. Had he asked who does Office programming, I would have held up my hand — and I bet at least half the room would have, as well.

In other words, Microsoft wasted a lot of people’s time with that presentation; and even more with a second presentation on SharePoint that followed lunch.

Things got much better once Familiar, O’Neil and Bowen were allowed to do MSDN Northeast Roadshow-style presentations. But by then, my humor had largely turned.

Networking: As I said, opportunities to mix and mingle weren’t that great before or during the event, because there were simply too many people going in too many directions.

There was a mixer announced after the event, in the form of a Microsoft employee shouting it across the lobby and into the elevators. I wish they had told me about that ahead of time, so I could have planned for it. I would have come to Boston a day ahead and stayed over. At the very least, I wish they had not sapped all my patience by that time.

The building of relationships is what these events are supposed to be all about. But Microsoft completely forgot to structure the event to make that even possible.

What I take back: On Thursday, my exhaustion and exasperation came off as angry. In all honesty, at that time, that’s what I was: Angry. It was over as soon as I got to South Station, but I shouldn’t have been angry, period.

No one was operating with malice; at least, no one set out to make me wish I hadn’t attended. I am sure there are lots of reasons for things not going the way I wish they had; I am sure others consider Launch 2010 a major success; I am certain my perspective is neither authoritative nor omniscient. But I would be very interested in seeing the evaluation form results.

What I stand by: Pretty much everything. It wasn’t a very good event. It won’t make me quit .NET programming, and I did learn some useful stuff. But it sure lowered my opinion of Microsoft.

All links in this post on delicious: http://www.delicious.com/dougvdotcom/the-visual-studio-launch-2010-boston-event-reconsidered

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The numbers inside parentheses are relevance scores. Scoring is based, in order of priority, on title, category, content and tags. The higher the score, the more likely that post relates to this post. ]]> 6:50 PM:

The event ended at 4:45 PM, following Chris Bowen’s very interesting overview of Windows Phone development. I was desperate to get out of there, and this is the first access to the Web (wifi on the Concord Coach bus) I’ve had since making a beeline for Copley Square.

On Windows Phone: It leverages Windows Presentation Foundation for applications and uses XNA (like XBox does) for games. The capacities of the phone seem on par with Android / iPhone, and Microsoft is using a vetting process similar to Apple’s for approving applications.

Developer tools, including an express version of Visual Studio 2010 and an emulator, are available at developer.windowsphone.com, where you can also register for their marketplace.

On the event’s end: End-of-event giveaways were paltry; a notebook charging station (not the laptop rumored earlier), three copies of VS 2010 and some trinkets, for 500+ attendees.

Not to sound greedy or childish, but that’s pretty cheap. If Microsoft can’t afford to seed its new products by giving away some of its software to those who were motivated enough to spend an entire day learning about it, that’s a sad, sad commentary.

Overall, I rate Launch 2010 a major disappointment. The afternoon sessions were good, but I have a feeling the Roadshow event being held in Augusta in two weeks will be effectively the same thing.

Overbooking the event, providing little more than glorified commercials for half the day, sending me home with garbage, hosting a mixer after they  wore out my patience and making me look like a fool for talking up this event has put a seriously sour taste in my mouth, one I won’t easily forget.

3:45 PM:

I have never been so glad to see the back of two guys’ heads as I am right now.

Apparently, everyone was here to listen to the ASP.NET 4.0 presentation, because there was a significant exodus immediately following it. About a third of those in attendance left.

That’s good news for me but bad news for Microsoft, which saved Windows Phone 7 for last. If what makes a smart phone a success is lots of good software, I don’t think the clearing out that just took place here bodes well.

That said, Chris Bowen is right now going over basic functionality of the phone OS. First feature of note: It integrates closely with XBox Live.

3:10 PM:

Jim O’Neil is speaking on ASP.NET 4.0, and it’s clear that just as I am petering out, this event is getting good.

The new ASP.NET and VS 2010 contains a number of useful enhancements: Native support for jQuery; an improved MVC model; more control over caching, targeting ViewState and the ability to assign client IDs to Web controls, which surely will help overcome the primary impediment to DOM scripting.

It also appears ASP.NET 4.0 is taking a more responsible view toward Web best practices and standards-based HTML coding / CSS. That’s about three years too late, but better late than never, I suppose.

There are still too many people here, so I can’t easily find a seat in the room and the nearest one outside barely allows me to hear O’Neil’s presentation.

I really resent Microsoft allowing this overflow. It’s not only making it impossible to find a new seat, it’s seriously impeding every attempt to network or meet people. There’s a human crush at the door at every break.

Overall, this has been a severe disappointment, especially compared to the VS 2008 launch.

2 PM:

I moved my feet and lost my seat — that’s how crowded this event is. And it appears they are still allowing walk-ins, even this late into the game. Next time, Microsoft, let’s set a firm attendance limit and start time. What’s going on right now is only punishing those of us who took the time to plan ahead.

That left me largely having to eavesdrop on Bob Familiar, he of the Northeast MSDN Roadshow, which is unfortunate — as his was the first presentation that really got into the traditional development technologies as they apply to VS 2010.

I wish I could have heard more or retained more. Suffice it to say, from the little I did hear, VS 2010 is fundamentally like VS 2008, with additional enhancements in team code management and Intellisense.

1:20 PM:

ZOMG, it’s another presentation on SharePoint! We were supposed to get a Partner pitch but apparently, SharePoint 2010 is Microsoft’s brave new Web 2.1 technology. (And if that’s the case, say goodbye to another hefty chunk of market share and relevance, Bill.)

So, I’m taking a break. Let’s look through the bag o’ swag for this event, shall we?

Here’s the bag itself. Plastic, festooned with the uninspired logos of the launch sponsors.

One black T-shirt, size XL. The front has a design that I am going to call “the LGBT rainbow surf wave.” Here’s the back:

You can’t tell from my crappy cell phone camera pic, but the top is the event logo, which is like road signs on posts, and the rest are the same sponsor logos that are on the bag.

Needless to say, this is going to Goodwill, or maybe the first homeless guy I see here in Boston.

The majority of the bag o’ swag contents: Sponsor fliers. Lots of them. There’s also some fliers from Microsoft. No white papers, just ads for things I guarantee 90 percent of the people attending here will never buy.

A major reason for coming here was hope that Microsoft would give away fully functional copies of VS 2010, and maybe even copies of Windows 7. No such luck.

Instead, there’s a disc called “Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance,” whatever that is; and we were handed a 90-day trail of VS 2010 Ultimate, which I suppose spares me the effort of having to download the same exact thing, which anyone can get from microsoft.com.

Finally, a note pad with half the page taken up by printed sales pitches and a Bic disposable pen round out the take.

Apparently, Microsoft will draw names from a hat to win some copies of VS 2010, a Toshiba laptop, and the like, at the end of the event. I’m not sure I want to stick around for that, as the seminars so far haven’t been very informative and there are too many people in attendance.

We were told this morning that Windows 7 is Microsoft’s fastest-selling OS and SharePoint 2010 is its fastest-selling server technology. But I guess Microsoft’s gonna keep that money, rather than plying developers with gifts.

12:20 PM:

It’s lunch time and thank the Heavens for it. The SharePoint presentation was absolutely brutal.

It appears there have been a number of improvements to SharePoint development, especially in terms of using business objects for data and in directly relating ASP.NET code into SharePoint structures. But that could have been covered in 10 minutes, and it took nearly 40.

As a result, the entirety of the demo for programming Office plug-ins was the presenter simply opening a prewritten Excel add-in and running it. That took all of three minutes.

Maybe I’m cranky from lack of sleep (I had to get up at 3 AM to get here on time). I know the worst position to have when speaking is the guy just before lunch or the end note. But I wish they had simply stuffed the swag bag with a white paper.  That would have been better, and I wouldn’t be suffering a MEGO hangover now.

More on swag in a bit.

10:50 AM:

Microsoft just went over application lifecycle management under VS 2010. It appears the integration tools for joining testers and developers’ efforts are a lot tighter. For example, if a tester spots a bug, after he flags it and the dev team corrects it, VS 2010 notes only those tests that need to be rerun as a result of the changes.

We couldn’t get into it very far, but it appears reporting is also heavily improved,  leveraging SQL Server 2008′s reporting tools.

On an event note, today officially marks the first time, other than at the horse track or ball field, that I’ve seen a line for a men’s room. That happens if, of about 1,000 people in attendance, three are girls.

Also of note: The check-in staff  handed most of the developers who arrived on time the wrong schedule. The ones who came late got the right schedule.

This is a mild annoyance, but one consequence is that half of the room now has bag lunches in hand and are munching away during the SharePoint presentation, since it’s time for the IT decision makers — the ones who should have got the schedules the developers actually got — are on lunch break. It is also causing a cacophony that makes hearing the speaker difficult.

Actually, I am sitting next to someone who has sinus problems, so his every-five-minutes snorting isn’t helping matters.

10:05 AM:

So I’m at the Westin Copley Place hotel’s America ballroom, hearing Microsoft’s launch event for Visual Studio 2010. Initial impressions:

1. The way to go to Boston from Augusta is the Concord Coach bus. Without question, it’s the most convenient and pleasant method. Clean, spacious buses with wifi and very courteous employees; plus, at $25 round trip, it’s cheaper than driving a car.
2. The Westin is a lovely hotel and puts on a very nice continental breakfast.
3. Microsoft has nothing of value to say about its product so far.  The essence of the keynote was that VS 2010 is a great way to work as a team and has new, useful tools to program for Azure (cloud) , SharePoint and mobile. A couple examples were provided, but they were so cursory as to be at best pointless, and (to this observer) somewhat confusing.
4. Wifi support is nonexistent. I am using my Droid and PdaNet. Memo to Microsoft: Free wifi next time. Seriously.

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The numbers inside parentheses are relevance scores. Scoring is based, in order of priority, on title, category, content and tags. The higher the score, the more likely that post relates to this post. ]]> Sent to me via e-mail from Billy, a frequent commenter on this blog (that is, for as infrequently as the blog gets comments, Billy is often one of those commenting):

I was wondering if I could get a small interview, just one question, for a term paper. I have 15 bibliography cards to do and I need sources and I was going through websites, found three good ones about career prospects in the programming/web development and design fields and that was it. I was thinking about people I could ask questions to and thought about you. I basically needed to know what you think the career opportunities in the programming and web development fields are and what you think they’ll be years on down the road. If you’re too busy I understand. Thank you for your time.

Billy:

I’m no industry analyst; my prognostications are usually limited to American football, and more often than not turn out wrong. (Quoth I, just before kickoff of Super Bowl 44: “The Saints are a great story, but this is gonna be a rout. Indy’s gonna annihilate them.”)

But I do have opinions about what programming and the Web will be like in 20 years, formed as a result of listening to others’ opinions, the history of the neolithic, agricultural and industrial revolutions, and my own experience of seeing how the Web has changed over the roughly 15 years I’ve been working in programming it.

The Web and computer programs we have today are, in a lot of ways, very much like the horse plow, rail fence and punch-card looms of antiquity. Today’s Web technologies and desktop programs are not primitive, but they’re largely second and third drafts of technologies that are changing fast.

The first Arab to tend a garden didn’t envision ConAgra; Adam Smith would probably have laughed at the notion of a Chinese economic juggernaut as he wrote The Wealth of Nations. The same will hold true of Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee: What they thought they were making, at the time they were making it, is markedly different from what we have today, and will result in something far different, further down the road.

As Technology Matures, More People Get Better Tools

Bandwidth and computational power is becoming both more plentiful and cheaper. Your generation, the first to live most of its life in the Internet age, is entering college and the working world, and your presence will continue to drive expectations about how we communicate and what constitutes “value” in an online world. And as that happens, we will see fundamental changes in where and how wealth is measured and stored — it will be less important to be an industrial nation, and more important to be a free (as in “free speech”) one, contrary to all the “China will rule the world” hype you hear today.

So I think there’s going to be plenty of work in Web development for years and years to come. But I believe it’s going to be less like it is today; that is, it will become less specialized, less a “profession” than a “vocation.” The artisan culture we have in programming today will go the way of the vassal and the blacksmith, because the information revolution will, like its predecessor economic revolutions, reward efficiency, simplicity and productivity; that is, anything that makes it easy and cheap for a lot of people to make a lot of products.

The standards and software that will be adopted as we go forward will make it easier for the average person to create new things and package information in useful ways; and as we go forward, packaging information in a way that is both useful and trustworthy is how one will make money on the whatever becomes of Web.

Aside: This would be where I might digress into a discussion about what constitutes “money,” in the sense of “currency,” but Billy didn’t ask for a dissertation on economic theory, he asked a simple question I’m already flogging to death. That said, I would recommend reading Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price if you want to understand how hard cash isn’t the only kind of currency. End of aside.

So programming and Web development will be less like the artistry it is today, and more like working an automobile assembly line. The tools will become standardized and plentiful. Much of what is done by hand today will be automated. Changing completely the nature of what you are making will require only a few tweaks here and there to your assembly line. (I don’t mean this analogy literally; there won’t be software factories. If anything, the future economy discourages the physical gathering of workers in one place; it encourages the formation of very small working groups.)

Some fine detail work will still need to be done by hand; some sense of artistry and skill will still be around, just as we still need landlords and blacksmiths. But just as it was with the agricultural and industrial ages, the Information Age will eventually produce skilled and semi-skilled labor that creates most of the economic output. There will still be academics / professionals who invent the tools and systems used by those workers to increase productivity and the like; there will still be unskilled laborers to mop floors and empty trash buckets. But most of the future’s computer programming — at least, if we define “computer programming” as “making something that manipulates its inputs into desired outputs” — will be done by the kinds of people who today have jobs as TV camera operators, accounting clerks, truck drivers and police officers.

One Big Channel

A consequence of that will be a general merging of our lines of communication.

The stratification we see today between common end-users (e.g, the guy who has a Twitter account) and the programmer / developers (e.g., the guy who invented Twitter) will blur. There won’t be many single sources of service, like Twitter or Facebook or even Google; the Internet will perform more like a smartphone, as an aggregator of all the information floating around out there, and a source of on-demand information — the difference being, the average person will have tools at his disposal to create the software, and maybe even the systems, that deliver and disseminate the information he wants in the manner he wants, largely independent of the channels we have today (that is, the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters).

In other words, in 20 years everyone will basically be a computer programmer and Web developer — but the computer, and the Web, will be very different from what they are now.

From Music Chamber To YouTube

There was a time when, if you wanted to be entertained, you went to someone’s house or a concert hall to hear an orchestra.

Then came the record player, and suddenly, you could be entertained without leaving home.

Then came the radio, and you hear something new, and get the same information everyone else had, instantaneously.

Then came the TV, and you could see, as well as hear, the performers.

Then came cable TV, and you were no longer tied to what local stations could show you or wanted you to see.

Then came the VCR, and you no longer had to be watching at a specific date and time.

Then came online access, and now you can instantly watch practically anything that has ever been recorded — be it on a network, a Hollywood movie or YouTube.

Something similar will happen with the Internet as its technologies mature and change to meet the needs of people. Today, there’s not a lot of work in playing violin for an orchestra or making vacuum tubes; but there is plenty of work in producing content.

Same will be true as the Internet matures; what we call programming today won’t be programming in 20 years, but there will still be some work for really smart people, a lot of work for kinda smart people, and a little work for really dumb people — just as it was in the agricultural and industrial ages.

Hope this helps. Sorry for prattling on if you wanted a quick and easy answer, but I felt the need to explain why I believe, as I do, that today’s programmers are yesterday’s weavers and the day before’s rain dancers.