The Coding Notes

Software development is a growing profession. In three blogposts we’ll be looking at the past, present and future of software development. This post I’ll be looking at the foreseeable future of our profession.  As a software developer I receive quite a few job offers, even internationally. It’s been rumored that our profession is quite popular. So let’s put our popularity in numbers.  Sadly, I could only find some statistics on the US hint at the popularity of our profession. For the US it’s been estimated that by 2021 there will be a shortage of 1.4 million software developers. This is besides the estimated 7 million developers already to be employed in the US. So 1 in 6 software development positions remain unfulfilled. This doesn’t even seem to take a decline of developers into account, e.g. because of  or just changing their profession.  Because of a lack of data I’ll presume that software developers are globally equal...

Software development is a growing profession. In three blog posts I’ll take a glance at the past, present and future of software development. This post is on software development from past to present. Humans have made devices that can compute complex calculations from input, as far back as 100 BC, like the Antikythera mechanism . The next step, programming, has been possible since at least the 9th century . The first programmable devices that we know of were programmable musical instruments. The first programs were thus rhythms and melodies. Centuries later Ada Lovelace appeared. She theoretically programmed an algorithm in 1843. She even wrote proofs that it would work. The software was to be executed by a Charles Babbage Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer. The engine ended up not being build, only sets of plans exist. This, sadly, prevented the growth of the profession of steam(punk) developers.  The principle of modern computers was proposed by Alan Turing in 1936 . Nine y...