Every decade, like clockwork, someone announces that developers are finished. The script never changes. A new technology promises to make the programmer redundant. Someone writes a triumphalist article. Decision-makers start dreaming about better margins.

Four times before

The 1980s: fourth-generation languages

4GLs promised the end of traditional programming. The finance manager would write his own reports. The sales analyst would build her own dashboard. For a while it worked, as long as the systems stayed small. Then the data grew, requirements got messier, performance began to degrade. In the end, developers were called in to rewrite everything in general-purpose languages.