What would Uncle Bob say?
What would he say, if we asked him what the future of programming looked like regarding the popular usage of AI? Fortunately he holds a talk titled "The Future of Programming" which we are going to review in this blog and try to imply what he would say to the future of programmers, with the rise of AI.
Robert Cecil Martin, also called Uncle Bob "is an American software engineer instructor, and author. He is most recognized for promoting many software design principles and for being an author and signatory of the influential Agile Manifesto." (Wikipedia, 2020)
I think he has a funny style and knows a lot about the software engineering industry since he programmed at the age of 17 years old, being self taught as mentioned on Wikipedia (2020).
One of the versions of his talk titled "The Future of Programming" (you can book it at UBC (cleancoder.com)) is available on Youtube on the channel of Paul Stringer's Mobile Tech (2016).
That particular version is more than 7 years old and since ChatGPT 3.5 wasn't released at that time, and with it the big popularity of AI wasn't there yet, we can't find a direct answer what Uncle Bob would say about the future of programming due to the rise of AI.
But if we look at the arguments Martin brings up we can imply what he probably has to say about Github Copilot and so forth.
Because in his talk he states that we programmers need to get to level of Software Professionalism.
He talks about disciplines that business wouldn't understand such as
- Pair Programming
- Test Driven Development
- Refactoring
- Simple Design
- We (Agile) must grow up
- Define our profession
- Choose our practises and disciplines
- Reunify Agile / Craftsmanship
- and Lead
His mayor argument regarding AI is that civilization would depends on us. He says that every day humans would interact with a software systems and that software even would kill people by mistake. He predicts that tens of thousands will die in a software catastrophe and it was only a matter of time. Legislators would then ask ourselves how this could have happened. In the end legislators would legislate us programmers in order to prevent such future accidents.
In order to avoid that, he says we need to legislate ourselves.
- Develop principles and ethics
- Decide who we are
- Set levels of basics morals disciplines
- Say no to our bosses sometimes
- Say an oath (say: that violates my oath: I won't do that)
- Create a body that enforces stuff (that can say, you are not a programmer any more, because you violated stuff)
We would need to
- Leave the era of the youthful programming mode
- Become true professionals
- Create a true professional body
- Follow a set of morals and disciplines
He says that that would be the future of programming.
And from these postulations we can imply what the answer to the question, what the future of programming together with AI should look like, is. => To become true professionals, to follow a set of morals and disciplines, to take responsibility over our software we can't let the machines solely do the programming as Dr. Matt Welsh, as seen in the previous post, predicts it.
Robert C. Martin probably would say, if we let AI do all the programming, a near disaster by software systems would be inevitable.
I'd wonder what is real opinion would be. Maybe you find something in the internet and let me know in the comments.
Cheers Simon
Update Feb 02 2024:
Robert Cecil Martin responded on X! Here's his answer:
Uncle Bob Martin
@unclebobmartin
AI is a nice tool. It will help those who understand it and know how to use it. It will not spell the end of programming or programmers. It will not bring the apocalypse. There will be no singularity.
Look, I've personally experienced an increase in computing power that exceeds twenty orders of magnitude. AI doesn't even come close to that kind of change. So don't fret.
Sources:
Robert C. Martin. (2020, July 11). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Martin
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