Could we expect more demand for software architects than programmers/developers in the future?

It seems to me like all basic coding has been done and the process of software development could be well automated. I feel there might be need for mostly software architects in the future who would be more involved in the business of software development.

It's likely to become more and more in demand, as software is more commonly becoming designed to be structured and re-useable.

There will always be a need for 'basic code' to be written - look at the embedded market.

You are right. Make a parallelism with construction work and you will see that, due to modern tools, machines and materials, an architect is more valuable than a constructor.

You are right to an extent, but people have been saying this for the last 20 years and look where we still are today. CASE tools were supposed to make everything automatic (design straight to code), but that never pans out in reality.

I think that automated code generation will only work really well in specific domain applications, with a framework for that particular domain.

Otherwise, programming is hard to do right. That's why a good software engineer is worth 20x an average software engineer.

I think one of the weaknesses of the argument that all programming can be automated is that it simplifies the process of coding. If coding was simple and "all basic coding has been done" why do software projects still fail, have many bugs, are hard to test, etc? I don't think that's the case. In the last few years, new coding techniques have become popular, so I don't think all basic coding has been done.

This is like some people who say all major scientific discoveries have already been made. It may seem that way, but how do you know we won't discover something that will drastically alter our knowledge of the universe beyond what you can possibly imagine today?

it depends on how you look at it, you need good developers to make good applications, if you look at .net it has become more automated with .net2.

when i was programming .net 1.1 you had to write code for paging, and sorting of datagrids. /net 2 this is more automated and if your using visual studio designer its a case of clicking on a couple of checkboxes to enable this to happen.

this has been included as nearly everyone who uses datagrids implemented there own version of this functionality so it became intergrated into the framework as it was popular.

i dont think that you will find more demmad for architects as, you need the programmers too, i mean tools like borland together, that architects use will generate some code for you, but you will still need a programmer to fill in the blanks, i think what you will see is people starting to develop both skills.

i mean there were bold statments made about case, beaing able to generate code, but this never happend, there were also statements that object orientated databases would see the end of table based databases, this is not the case either, mysql ms sql and oracle are still big, allthough orable and db2 have both worlds together.

you still need programmers to write the code, and that there will still be bugs in code. and programmers to fix them