The end of programming?

While this blog has so far been mostly timeless, I'm going to comment here on a current event: an article arrived today in my mailbox, titled "The End of Programming"^* and subtitled, "The end of classical computer science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit," written by Matt Welsh.

I'm arguing that the use of PicoStack to develop small web applications could continue, long after most computer applications are developed using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, and code is being written routinely by AI agents instead of humans.

Managing channels

A previous post, Pico channels, defines and describes channels, and prescribes some best practices for managing them. 

This post tells a story of bad consequences when that advice was ignored^*, and also describes a more resilient way to set up the channels for one particular application.

Consider a pico that records temperature readings from remote sensors. The sensors need a channel to post their readings periodically. A web application allowing the history of those readings to be explored also needs a channel to the pico.

Notifications

Each pico, from the moment it is created, is a first-class Internet resource, exposing a rich API of events and queries. It maintains a boundary between its internal state and the outside world.

When something interesting happens inside the pico the owner/controller of the pico may want to be notified.

A previous post about sending email illustrated this for that notification method. In this post, we'll discuss sending a message into a Microsoft Teams channel. Similar techniques can be used so that our pico can notify other message systems.