"In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments."
They actually were somewhat correct in 1982. While they do not explicitly mention AI, we can summarize that e. g. claude is, in some ways, an "improved tool" for some parts of writing code.
What we are getting is the revenge of 4 GLs and Japan's fifth generation computer vision, which were seen as the evolution of traditional languages, although did not take off at the time as expected.
They get closer to AI if you read forward 2 sentences, moreso if you stop reading before “perhaps”:
“Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages.”
"In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments."
They actually were somewhat correct in 1982. While they do not explicitly mention AI, we can summarize that e. g. claude is, in some ways, an "improved tool" for some parts of writing code.
What we are getting is the revenge of 4 GLs and Japan's fifth generation computer vision, which were seen as the evolution of traditional languages, although did not take off at the time as expected.
They get closer to AI if you read forward 2 sentences, moreso if you stop reading before “perhaps”:
“Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages.”