It occurred to me on my walk today that a program is not the only output of programming.

The other, arguably far more important output, is the programmer.

The mental model that you, the programmer, build by writing the program.

And -- here's the million dollar question -- can we get away with removing our hands from the equation? You may know that knowledge lives deeper than "thought-level" -- much of it lives in muscle memory. You can't glance at a paragraph of a textbook, say "yeah that makes sense" and expect to do well on the exam. You need to be able to produce it.

(Many of you will remember the experience of having forgotten a phone number, i.e. not being able to speak or write it, but finding that you are able to punch it into the dialpad, because the muscle memory was still there!)

The recent trend is to increase the output called programs, but decrease the output called programmers. That doesn't exactly bode well.

See also: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Peter Naur had that realization back in 1985: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf