29th July 2026

Years ago, we didn’t have SQL. There were people whose job was to generate software that would query large data sets. Their job title was COBOL programmer.

Then SQL comes along—I’m simplifying this only a little bit—and it gives you this convenient way so people could just specify. With a very simple specification, you can generate all of that code that you had to pay the expensive COBOL programmer to do before.

That didn’t mean programmers went away. It just meant the job changed a little bit.

— D. Richard Hipp

Posted 29th July 2026 at 9:15 pm

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This is a quotation collected by Simon Willison, posted on 29th July 2026.

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