"In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments."
They actually were somewhat correct in 1982. While they do not explicitly mention AI, we can summarize that e. g. claude is, in some ways, an "improved tool" for some parts of writing code.
If you look at science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency - good for handling mundane automation, answering the occasional question, and usurping power, but not in any sense capable of solving original engineering problems.
It's much easier to imagine a big defence-linked computer system like Skynet than something like Claude or ChatGPT, which can improvise working software to a vague spec.
I'm sure a lot of developers have had "I wish I could just tell it to build what I want" moments on the past, but I'm not sure anyone anticipated being able to do it, even five years ago.
I was choosing what to study at university in 1982, and I was advised not to pick computing since AI was going to take over programming and there would be limited careers for humans.
What we are getting is the revenge of 4 GLs and Japan's fifth generation computer vision, which were seen as the evolution of traditional languages, although did not take off at the time as expected.
They get closer to AI if you read forward 2 sentences, moreso if you stop reading before “perhaps”:
“Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages.”
They actually were somewhat correct in 1982. While they do not explicitly mention AI, we can summarize that e. g. claude is, in some ways, an "improved tool" for some parts of writing code.
If you look at science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency - good for handling mundane automation, answering the occasional question, and usurping power, but not in any sense capable of solving original engineering problems.
It's much easier to imagine a big defence-linked computer system like Skynet than something like Claude or ChatGPT, which can improvise working software to a vague spec.
I'm sure a lot of developers have had "I wish I could just tell it to build what I want" moments on the past, but I'm not sure anyone anticipated being able to do it, even five years ago.
Particularly the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... was cited.
“Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages.”