The future is fewer people writing code?

That's not true and even Sussman acknowledges this:

"The fundamental difference is that programming today is all about doing science on the parts you have to work with. That means looking at reams and reams of man pages and determining that POSIX does this thing, but Windows does this other thing, and patching together the disparate parts to make a usable whole.

Beyond that, the world is messier in general. There’s massive amounts of data floating around, and the kinds of problems that we’re trying to solve are much sloppier, and the solutions a lot less discrete than they used to be."

Your info was relevant to the idea of that at some level of complexity it becomes necessary to use text vs. only graphic presentation. Maybe in construction that occurs when there are more than a few elevations to juggle, but you probably know much more about it than me.

I supported the article's thesis, that fewer people will be coding in the future, and provided a couple of anecdata points from my experience. I don't think code is unnecessary magic to be done away with. It's essential magic that becomes invisible when done well, to everyone's benefit.

And to clarify, creative work isn't limited to the arts. The creative impulse is common and has multiple outlets. Engineering is every bit as creative as portraiture or sculpture or crafting LOTR on a ginormous graphics processor farm.

My observation is that as the need for coding has decreased due in large part to increased computational sophistication, it's gotten easier for a wider range of people to do contributive work.

Suppose you have something to say about climate change. If you need to model it, you have several global models you can run, without having to code FEA and planetary atmospheric physics from scratch.

Or pick an artistic field - I know a hand weaver who uses commercial software to visualize her designs before she heads off to her hand loom. She'll never code a simple if/then/else statement, but the (invisible to her) code in the app lets her do things she'd never have time or resources to try otherwise.

Even in your medical example - I'll guess that fewer than 2% of the surgeons who use a Da Vinci medical robot could do anything useful with the code that runs that system. And if learning to code the robot were a prerequisite to using it, it would be a failed product.

I like your thought of a device for home appendectomy. Why not, really? Ultrasound imaging, vital signs sensing, actuators for retractors, scalpels...and lots of invisible code to make it work well. Just the thing for clinics in parts of the world where there is appendicitis but no doctors.

Code may not be designed to obfuscate, but it does that to many who would otherwise be able to use computation to do something new and useful. I think the more sophisticated code becomes, the less it will be a critical skill for most people. Which is good. We'll be free to figure out the next important thing and work on making it trivial.