Mark Twain was the first author to submit a manuscript in typewritten form. He invested in an early typewriter. Given that you had no erase functions in early typewriters, it was the precision task of a secretary to spell and type accurately. As we invented the ability to erase mistakes, the need for a skilled typist gradually disappeared. Now with autocorrection, people can be awful spellers and the world will never know. You are correct that as computer programming gets easier, there will be less need for professional programmers, as simple programs will be done by end users. If you think about it, every day devices get more computerized, and users take more of the load off technicians. A mainframe computer would take 1 person 30 minutes to start up, now your cellphone can reboot in less than a minute, and all you gotta do is remember the keypress sequence to get it going or shut it down (if you even bother shutting it down)

I think programming will be different than your analogy of typing in at least one respect — people do not write typewriters and spellcheck into existence. Those advancements were made by engineers, not writers themselves. You did speak to this difference (" less need for professional programmers"), but I suspect that the self-application of programming advancement by programmers will lead to more surprising outcomes than might be expected.

I love that. In general, I tend to get impatient with analogies that try to make programming familiar. It isn't familiar, it is deeply weird compared to anything that has come before.

Agreed, but insofar as programming is a practice applied to itself, it's similar to metalworking and philosophy.

Maybe programming is not as weird as that (sorry to play with your patience, @Kartik Agaram😉 ). Or at least algorithm is a familiar concept. For example cooking with a recipe. You follow an algorithm that was programmed (the recipe) by someone else.

kind of off topic, but this makes me think of the article from august about Twain & his interest & investment in pocket watches, in that Twain seems really to have been a pretty advanced fellow, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/mark-twains-quest-bring-affordable-watches-masses-180972813/