Coding Myths – Like any other rapidly evolving technology/ methodology, ‘programming’ has also been a victim of the wretched myths. It’s very easy for novice programmers to be convinced that manual coding is losing it’s importance and automated software generation will entirely take over in years to come. Some even naively predict that, somewhere in future, programmers will face a dead end in their career as software will be developed straight from the user’s specifications. In this article, I aim to bust this myth and educate the victims of the myth.

The level of abstraction seen in many high level languages today is phenomenal, take C# (Sharp) for example. It will never eliminate the need for manual coding since all the requirements will have to be accurate, formal and detailed enough so that the machine can perceive and execute it properly. A code is the foundation of an application that represents every minute detail of the requirements; as a programmer, one just can’t ignore these details at any stage of development. Also, a program grows imperfect as the level of complexity increases. We cannot either ignore a universal rule that there is always room for improvement. So, no matter what generation of programming technology/ methodology a program is built with, at some point of time, the source code or a module will definitely need manual alteration/ updates.

Many ambitious aspirants wish to build artificially intelligent machines, aiming to output “What one wants” rather “What one says”. For this, the machines will really have to understand a user, precise enough that it can translate even the most ambiguous decision into perfectly executable programs and succeed.

One really has to remember that a code is the ultimate expression of systems requirements. A programmer may use any language or custom tools to build a program. The need for manual coding will never die, rather exist to seek perfection the built application.

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