In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions.
We used to write algorithms. Now we call APIs.
Very few people get to work on low level C algorithms that just move bytes around any more. Most of us spend all our time these days calling APIs, not moving bytes.
So my question is, if this is the current state of programming, and if the future of programming is just going to make it worse, how can we make it work better? Maybe this is one answer:
If we can move from perfection to similarity, then we can start to reexamine the way we build software. So instead of requiring protocol adherence in which each component has to be perfectly matched to other components down to the bit, we can begin to have similarity. Then a form of very graceful error tolerance, with a predictable overhead, becomes possible. The big bet I want to make as a computer scientist is that that's the secret missing ingredient that we need to create a new kind of software.