Why cloud computing will kill programming – and make us all developers

We've been promised all sorts of benefits from cloud computing: faster development, cheaper applications - and even a recession-friendly switch from capex to opex for IT projects.

All of this is marvellous news for the CIO, but could it be that the cloud is anything but good news for the humble techie?

Certainly those IT workers who spend their time taking care of rickety, homegrown enterprise applications will find their jobs automated when the business moves to cloud applications instead. But as cloud computing matures over the next few years, could the impact on tech workers be even greater? Could the cloud really kill off programming altogether?

In this new cloud computing world, so the argument goes, any element needed to build an application will already exist on the web somewhere, so all that will be needed is for someone to connect up this series of ready-made modules and APIs in order to create a new application. Read more...