The history of the Jacquard loom is being misused here.
The loom did not erase weaving as a profession, nor did it cleanly replace skilled labor with a small class of abstract “engineers.” After its adoption, textile employment in France increased as production scaled and demand surged. What disappeared was a narrow form of manual pattern threading, while new roles multiplied: pattern card designers, loom mechanics, machine adjusters, quality specialists, and weavers who understood how to intervene when the machine failed. The most successful workers were not removed from the process.
The blog treats automation as a one-way ladder away from hands-on work. Jacquard looms still required constant technical judgment, maintenance, correction, and redesign. Pattern cards encoded decisions made by experienced weavers, not by people detached from production. Productivity gains lowered cloth prices, expanded markets, and increased the total amount of textile work done. The lesson of the loom is that automation concentrates skill and raises the bar for competence. It rewards people who understand the system deeply and can shape, correct, and extend it. That is the historical pattern the blog overlooks.
I guess it really depends on what you consider "programming" but the overall blog is pretty disengenuous in what it's trying to represent.
altmanaltman•1h ago
The loom did not erase weaving as a profession, nor did it cleanly replace skilled labor with a small class of abstract “engineers.” After its adoption, textile employment in France increased as production scaled and demand surged. What disappeared was a narrow form of manual pattern threading, while new roles multiplied: pattern card designers, loom mechanics, machine adjusters, quality specialists, and weavers who understood how to intervene when the machine failed. The most successful workers were not removed from the process.
The blog treats automation as a one-way ladder away from hands-on work. Jacquard looms still required constant technical judgment, maintenance, correction, and redesign. Pattern cards encoded decisions made by experienced weavers, not by people detached from production. Productivity gains lowered cloth prices, expanded markets, and increased the total amount of textile work done. The lesson of the loom is that automation concentrates skill and raises the bar for competence. It rewards people who understand the system deeply and can shape, correct, and extend it. That is the historical pattern the blog overlooks.
I guess it really depends on what you consider "programming" but the overall blog is pretty disengenuous in what it's trying to represent.