Commentary — Programmer or trained monkey?

Have real programmers gone extinct? I often come across the view that programming 
 isn’t what it used to be. Now and then I hear things like “Sure, you have frameworks and standard libraries now,” or “A programmer spends more time looking up information than actually programming,” or “Today’s programmer is a trained monkey.”

Whenever I hear such views, I wonder whether real programmers truly have gone extinct. What does it mean to be a real programmer and to program the way people used to? Does it mean climbing back up into the trees and living as fruit gatherers? How do you decide a programmer belongs in the trained-monkey category?

Above all, don’t pigeonhole people!

You haven’t written anything in assembly? What, you don’t even know the difference between cooperative and preemptive multitasking? You haven’t written your own bflmpsvz program in xyz? You aren’t a programmer anymore. You’re just a trained monkey. Real programmers write assembly, know all their hardware inside out, and won’t use anything they haven’t examined down to the last instruction …

Real programmers like that did exist, but they’d starve in today’s world. Programming as a widespread activity really has evolved over several decades. We no longer have to think in terms of particular processors or even a particular platform. We can 
concentrate on the problem we’re solving.

Approaches like object-oriented programming, aspect-oriented programming, and design patterns should be among the yardsticks for today’s real programmers. A modern programmer doesn’t necessarily have to know a language (their tool) in detail, but must be able to find and analyze information to put that tool to use.

Trained monkeys belong in the circus and wild monkeys in the jungle. Today’s real programmers belong in software companies, and the ones who can’t be reformed belong in a museum.