40 Years of Programming: What AI Changes and What It Never Will - Venkat Subramaniam | The Marco Show

Michael Simons, a longtime Java developer and Neo4j engineer, joins Marco to talk about the engineering principles that have stayed relevant across decades of changing technologies. The conversation covers database-first thinking, Spring and the Java ecosystem, graph databases, developer tooling, and why pragmatic decisions often matter more than chasing the “best” framework. They also discuss how AI is changing software development, where AI tools genuinely help, and why human judgment and responsibility still matter. 💡 In this episode: Why Michael still starts with the data model when building applications

Sébastien Deleuze, a longtime Spring Framework committer and member of the Spring AI team, joins Marco to talk about how 13 years on the Spring team shaped his pragmatic approach to software development. The conversation covers how Spring AI fits into the Spring ecosystem, why enterprise AI still needs deterministic workflows and human accountability, and why long-term software quality matters even as GenAI changes how code gets written. 💡 In this episode: How Sébastien joined the Spring team through open source contributions

Josh Long, Spring Developer Advocate at Broadcom, joins Marco to cover 25 years of Spring history and what the JVM's real shot at the AI era actually looks like. Josh has published a weekly blog since 2011 and a weekly podcast since 2018 without missing an episode. This conversation gets into why vibe coding concerns him as an engineer, what accountability for AI-generated code actually means, and why Python's dominance in AI is more a marketing gap than a technical one. 💡 In this episode: Spring's origin story: why the documentation came before the code

Martin Lippert, longtime maintainer of Spring Tools and one of the people who has witnessed developer tooling evolve from Eclipse to VS Code, joins Marco to discuss how AI is transforming Java development, and what that means for the future of software engineering. ⏱️ Timestamps: (00:00) Teaser(00:38) Meet Martin Lippert, Spring Tools & the evolution of Java IDEs(03:28) What happened to Eclipse? Lessons from the rise and fall of a Java giant(12:20) Why Spring Tools moved to VS Code and embraced the Language Server Protocol(20:03) How AI is changing Java development and everyday coding workflows(21:59) Martin's AI workflow: Cursor, IDEs, code review & testing(26:16) Building developer tools for AI agents instead of humans(31:10) Why AI is changing release cycles and developer tooling(36:03) AI review fatigue, cognitive depth & trusting generated code(39:06) Will AI replace senior developers? What happens to junior engineers?(42:16) The future of Java, Spring & software architecture in an AI-first world(48:42) AI's hidden energy problem and the sustainability challenge(54:39) Practical tips for greener software engineering and AI usage(1:00:06) Giveaway & rapid-fire questions

Martin Odersky, creator of Scala and co-designer of Java generics, joins Marco to trace the full arc from Pizza (the 1996 functional Java experiment) to Scala 3, and on to his vision for capabilities as a safety mechanism for AI-generated code. They discuss how Scala unified object-oriented and functional programming, the Scala 2 to 3 evolution (implicits, Tasty, the new compiler), higher-kinded types, and why Martin believes programming languages need to grow up fast to keep AI agents from doing catastrophic things in production. Topics in this episode: The origins of Scala and the Pizza language