[BrandonMTurner]

It is hard to define what the "general public" is in your post. But I will assume, that you mean, at one day will 50% of the population that has access to a computer will be able to code.

And from me, I think that is an easy "No". I don't know why they would want to either. A lot people are not interested in buildings things (physical or digital) and are not interested in how things work. If they were, then I think by this point the general public would know how a car works, but I would say most people don't have a non trivial understanding of a simple motor.

Moreover, I think you are highly overestimating the ability of the general public in that it is a "small step" from going from wrapping text with some kind of special marker (<b>,<i>, etc...) to change the font style to how a DOM and layout engine works. In my experience, obviously this is very anecdotal, it is hard to explain the difference between block elements and inline elements, margins and padding to people that are smart (at least in my opinion) and truly want to learn.

[kls]

I think the car analogy is spot on, most people do not want to crack the hood and get there hands dirty. There have been many attempts to create visual languages as well as user friendly development environments. Probably the two that have come the closest would be Flash and Microsoft Access and as history has shown even development in those two technologies gets relegated to a development roll. The problem is that development get's complicated fast and these environments by their nature just cant deal with that complexity, and if they do deal with it, they do so by dropping back to allowing the user to write code.

If and when computers advance to the point of being able to read our thoughts and translating that into an application, then we will see the nature of programming truly change. But I would suspect at that point most people would not be using vendor written software, but would be thinking up custom tailored software that works the way their mind thinks. The very nature of computing will have changed at that point so whether or not there are programmers, would be akin to wondering if their will be coopers to make barrels for grog. It depends on a plethora of variables that may not even exist due to the nature of the product being totally different by that time.

[paisible]

You are right about it being hard to explain the difference between block and inline, even to smart people who want to learn. My argument is that there could simply be more people who want to learn, having been exposed early on to similar concepts, and that an increasing number of those people won't necessarily come from CS backgrounds.