This issue originally appeared on Quora, a learning network where skilled people with experience answer questions. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
The question is answered by Hadi Partovi, CEO at Code.org; IT innovator / investor:
Absolutely. Not only will programming be relevant for 10 years from now, but it will be even more important, although the syntax of programming languages will become easier. At the beginning, encoding meant slots on a piece of cardboard. Then it looked like this: 00101010101, and now looks very much like English. As programming languages become more resembling the English language spoken, they will become clearer and more popular. Additionally, as computer systems increasingly penetrate our lives, the need and popularity of devices that make what we want to do and discover new uses for them will grow.
We have a long way in front of us (many, many decades) before talking with devices in a simple, natural language so that we expect them to perfectly understand and perform the tasks for which they are trained. We already have simple, pre-programmed tasks, for example. “Give me the direction to the nearest gas station.”
But in order to teach the computer to do something that has not been done before, you will need a special knowledge of how you can interact with the computer. which requires the expertise of a computer programmer, and computer thinking needed to describe an algorithm. The syntax of making cycles or conditional blocks can be changed, but the basic concepts will surely remain for a long time.
