[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.