David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

It tapped out.

This is what's so hard about predicting the future.

We can be so excited in the moment because we're drawing a line through early dots on a chart.

And it looks like those early dots are just going up and to the right.

And sometimes they just flatten out.

This is also one of those things where we have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on COBOL, that about five humans around the world really understand truly, deeply, that it's possible for society to lose a competence it still needs because it's chasing the future.

COBOL is still with us.

This is one of the things I think about with programming.

Ruby on Rails is at such a level now that in 50 years from now, it's exceedingly likely that there's still a ton of Ruby on Rails systems running around.

Now, very hard to predict what that exact world is going to be like, but yesterday's weather tells us that if there's still COBOL code from the 70s operating Social Security today, and we haven't figured out a clean way to convert that, let alone understand it, we should certainly be...

humble about predicting the future.

I don't think any of the programmers who wrote that COBOL code back in the 70s had any damn idea that in 2025 checks were still being cut off the business logic that they had encoded back then.

But that just brings me to the conclusion on the question for what should a young programmer do?

You're not going to be able to predict the future.

No one's going to be able to predict the future.

If you like programming, you should learn programming.

Now, is that going to be a career forever?

I don't know.

But what's going to be a career forever?

Who knows?