Over 700 companies have gone on through YC, so they now have a few thousand alums and actively maintain an Alumni network -- really wish universities had something like this!
The companies go through the program in cohorts for a set amount of time -- they call these "classes". Not sure if universities have anything of the sort.
Sam Altman himself said that soon he "we will have to do something" with respect to housing. Again, nothing like I've seen any university do.
My personal favorite, though, is the part where they get everyone to come to dinner together to exchange experiences and whatnot. If only Harvard figured out that they could use their beautiful dining hall for this sort of thing...
The things you're describing here are common to many large organisations - is Google a university?
Tellingly, you don't mention the primary reason universities exist - to educate, regardless of the profitability of the subject. This is exactly the opposite of YC's primary goal, which is to make money and avoid unprofitable investments.
Back in the day I worked with a project manager who would edit a spec in Word and save it, not tell anyone she'd done it, then be angry the next day when she launched the software and it hadn't changed. Because that's how plain English programming works: magic elves.
I had another colleague at a different job, a chemistry PhD so (on paper at least) a smart guy, but he genuinely could not get his head around the idea that software was something that was written. Software was something that was found and the skill was like the skill of being a gold prospector in the hills panning for that program that would do what you wanted.
Like good enough voice recognition? The fact that we dreamed about computers and robots since first mechanical automatons, perhaps earlier and for many years we couldn't crack it doesn't mean that we haven't and we won't.
I think the author is wrong but not because we won't have visual building blocks and flexible language interfaces. Rather because event if you try to describe what you induction cooking plate does for you using visual building blocks and English language you still end up with pretty tangled mess that only real programmer could have patience for.
> even if you try to describe what you induction cooking plate does for you using visual building blocks and English language you still end up with pretty tangled mess that only real programmer could have patience for.
Sorry, I should have been less succinct - I totally agree with you, visual languages already exist and are improving all the time. I don't believe that they will lead to a world without programmers for the reasons you state. They are just another way to express syntax, they don't reduce the complexity of the actual problem being solved.
Voice recognition is not "good enough" yet. It is better at simple commands than it used to be, and more ubiquitous, but it is still incredibly limited. Frankly, it's right up there with visual programming as a technology that's been touted as 5-10 years away from a breakthrough for decades.
More like the last 50 or 60 years: "the programming occupation will become extinct (through the further development of self-programming techniques)" (Herbert A. Simon, 1961, and the notion seems to be even older, cf. Janet Abbate's "Re-Coding Gender", page 74-75)
From the same book (p. 84): "Stephanie Shirley, who started a contract programming company in the early 1960s, later recalled: 'When COBOL was introduced, we thought that would be the end of the company, that nobody would be buying software anymore – programming – because it was just so easy.'"
