For a list of BASHing data 2 blog posts see the index page. 
What a long, strange trip it's been
For the title of this post I'm Grateful to Robert Hunter.
I wrote my first lines of code in 1961, in high school. There's a picture of our classroom in Wikipedia from 1960 with IBM operation codes above the chalkboard, but I can't remember using them. Instead we wrote short programs in FORTRAN (FORTRAN II, 1958).
I don't remember what our class was asked to code, but it was something very simple, like Find the product of 3 times 4.
Three years later, biochemist and science-fiction author Isaac Asimov visited the New York World's Fair and was inspired to publish some predictions about life in 2014. One of them was
All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology, will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those, like the contemporary "Fortran" (from "formula translation").
Why did Asimov make that prediction? Because in 1964 computers were mainframes that only did what they were programmed to do for particular operations, by programmers on-site or in touch with would-be users. Programming a computer and using that computer were closely tied.
That was still true well into the personal computer era. As quoted by Paul Lefebvre, a 1983 review of the Atari 1200XL home computer described it as "an attractive tool for the serious programmer".
Nevertheless, programming was progressively decoupled from computer use. Today there are literally billions of computers but a vastly smaller number of programmers. You don't have to be a coder to operate a smartphone, tablet or desktop, any more than you need to be a mechanic to operate a car or an airplane.
For an in-depth discussion of the kind of error made by Asimov, see this blog post by Sangeet Paul Choudary. The post tackles what are likely to be mistaken predictions about the impact of AI.
I watched the decoupling happen during my own career in science. In the latter part of the 1960s, biology and chemistry were computer-free. Data and documents were managed with pen and paper, or with mechanical typewriters. Ten years later I was using a programmable calculator to analyse forestry data, but the results still got manually copied to paper.
That was the last time for many years that I needed to program. In the latter part of the 1980s, client-server networks were in every STEM workplace. The installed software included everything needed for data and document work. If you had other ideas, you were told "You can't do that with our system."
The 1990s saw rapid growth in software "add-ons": programs written for existing hardware, to expand the possibilities of what you could do with a computer. No programming required — just buy the discs and install.
The 1990s also saw the phenomenal expansion of the World Wide Web, and tinkerers like me used that time to learn HTML, then CSS.
And 25+ years later? Well, There's an app for that™, whether you're doing stuff on a phone or working with a laptop or desktop on data and documents. The app was written by an anonymous somebody or team, somewhere and somewhen. Sorry, Mr Asimov: high school students don't have to understand computers or binary arithmetic, and don't have to be proficient in any programming language. That's all been done for them. The split between programmers and computer users in 2025 could hardly be more complete.
Except maybe in data auditing? There really isn't any off-the-shelf or GitHub-able software that would make my auditing work substantially easier, thanks to the big diversity of datasets I look at and the even bigger diversity of data problems. Instead I open a terminal and run simple programs I code myself, often cobbled together from shell tools more than 30 years old. I also enjoy building small programs that help my wife and I do computer-based jobs more efficiently.
Programming is partly coupled with computer use in our household, so 1964 ain't quite dead yet.
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2025-06-06 Making an archive job a lot easier
Last update: 2025-05-30
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