Ever since we began programming in the 1950s, there have been two diametrically opposed tendencies within computer science and software engineering: on the left side of the Glorious Throne of Alan Turing, the tendency to perfect the Art of Computer Programming, and on the right side, the tendency to end it. These tendencies can be seen from the Manchester Mark I's "autocode" removing the need for programmers shortly after WW2; COBOL being a language that could be "read by the management"; to contemporary "no-code" development environments; and the idea that large language models herald "The End of Programming".

This vision paper looks at what AI will not change about software systems, and the people who must use them, and necessarily must build them. Rather than neglecting 50 years of history, theory, and practice, and assuming programming can, will, and should be ended by AI, we speculate on how AI has, already does, and will continue to perfect one of the peak activities of being human: programming.

James Noble (kjx@acm.org) is an independent creative researcher & programmer based in Wellington, New Zealand. After completing honours and doctoral degrees at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), James worked at the University of Technology, Sydney, the Microsoft Research Institute at Macquarie University, and is recovering from a long stint as professor of computer science & software engineering at VUW.

James’s research centres around software design. This includes the design of the users’ interface, the parts of software that users have to deal with every day, and the programmers’ interface, the internal structures and organisations of software that programmers see only when they are designing, building, or modifying software.

James’s research in both of these areas is coloured by a longstanding interest in object-oriented approaches to design, and topics he has studied range from aliasing and object ownership, programming languages, design patterns, agile methodology, via usability, visualisation and computer music, to postmodernism and the semiotics of programming.