The future is fewer people writing code?

I don't know if I agree with the author since they didn't seem to provide any evidence / argument for why the future is codeless. They did warn me though that I wouldn't be able to understand from my vantage point in Silicon Valley though so maybe other people see the argument? But from my perspective code is only growing without showing signs of abating.

Coding in a good language already consists of writing about the things you care about, not the things the computer cares about. Text (with a few symbols) turns out to be the best way to express computations, not to a computer but to a human reader/maintainer.

The future is most professionals writing code as part of their job, just as the present is most professionals writing as part of their job.

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be."

Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old.

Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something nasty. Doing that with voice commands in my opinion is significantly harder compared to what we have now.

We will have tools, accessible, easy tools; Arduinos and Pis of the future; sure. But it will not replace, nor eliminate or reduce the amount of code written.

It seems like this is focused a lot on what people want to do, as opposed to what provides value. Not that that's a bad focus! But if you want to predict the future, I think market forces would be a better indicator; as much as we might want to move to a future where programming involves more intuitive tools, I still think it will be more powerful, and thus valuable, to be able to muck around in the code.

"...so why are we having a serious conversation about grooming children to become software developers before they’ve even gone to middle school?"

We're not, really, but given the pervasiveness of computing technology we're recognizing that it's important for children to have some formal experience with software design concepts regardless of which career path they choose.

I'm a firm believer that at least some coding ability is beneficial in any profession. It's like writing, or vocabulary; you don't "need" it for some professions, per se, but being a good writer enhances both your professional and personal life in many ways, so it's worthwhile to teach. It's much the same with coding.