The Death of Utilitarian Programming

Summary

Utilitarian coding is defined as follows: The code you write should be *directly* useful or serve the interest of at least one actual human being. It might appear somewhat abstract or vague, so examples might help. For example, I don't consider frameworks as utilitarian code. What you create are like the "frames" of a picture box, someone else (the user) will take it and draw the actual picture. Though you did help with part of the process, it's indirect at best. You're part of the supply chain here, not part of the team.A clever and witty bash script running on a unix server somewhere is also not utilitarian coding, no human ever directly benefited from it.Libraries can be somewhat utilitarian, at least more than frameworks. At least they provide some reusable functionality to the user out of the box like logging, scanning a barcode, fetching data from a URL, etc. But again, a lot of indirection and little lasting time, what did *you* learn about implementation and life in that process my friend?It's my strong belief that our life's purpose isn't just about learning technology but also other non-technical things in life (such as life itself). By compartmentalizing themselves into libraries, frameworks, specifications, package managers, build and tooling, etc, many coders over the last decade have sort of divorced themselves from the intricacies and interaction with life itself.A decade ago from now (i.e. circa 2014-15) is where I'd say utilitarian coding came to an end. The kind of programming that prevailed until then (mostly desktop programming) was highly utilitarian in nature. You used to develop a Winforms App for the client, with actual textboxes, dropdowns and buttons, tailored to their specific requirements and domain knowledge, what could be more utilitarian than that! You used to gain domain expertise and not just technology expertise.As things started moving to the cloud, the interaction between the end-user and programmer became less and less, that's wh...