Whatever Happened To Programming?

Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations mdash; combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges." This 3-day-old article has sparked lively discussions at Reddit and at Hacker News, and the author has responded with a followup and summation.pa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/07/0043215/Whatever-Happened-To-Programming?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/07/0043215"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F07%2F0043215%2FWhatever-Happened-To-Programming" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Whatever+Happened+To+Programming%3F%3A +http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Fc4HW4g" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/07/0043215/Whatever-Happened-To-Programming?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8NJGlHXBV07mcIAf-czPcRmHIBs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8NJGlHXBV07mcIAf-czPcRmHIBs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8NJGlHXBV07mcIAf-czPcRmHIBs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8NJGlHXBV07mcIAf-czPcRmHIBs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/db9hetWdnhM" height="1" width="1"/

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