I wouldn't say utterly failed. The tools never completely replaced programmers, but they allowed programmers to be replaced in certain domains. The obvious exa

I wouldn't say utterly failed. The tools never completely replaced programmers, but they allowed programmers to be replaced in certain domains. The obvious example is Excel. Imagine if there were no Excel. How many more programmers would every enterprise needed to hire just to reach the current level of productivity. Every bank, hedge fund, and financial institution would have hired a programmer for every one or two analysts. They hire a few now, but nowhere near the level that would have been necessary without Excel. Another example is LabVIEW. The interface is basically a board where you arrange your flowchart boxes (virtual instruments in LabVIEW terminology), configure them through the menus, and connect them together with wires to express the flow of data. The mechanical/electrical/... engineer herself designs the programs that read data from sensors, save them, analyze them, and send appropriate instruction to actuators based on them [1]. I have seen entire assembly lines running on LabVIEW. To the best of my knowledge, the entire program was conceived without any input from software engineers. Had LabVIEW not existed, many many more software engineers would have had to be hired by laboratories, manufacturing facilities, and research institutes. Not every attempt for eliminating programmers has been successful, but to call all of them snake oil-driven is incorrect. The field of software engineering is young and has not stabilized yet. I would expect that in the coming decades, increasingly more products would be created to replace specific uses of software development. The demand for programmers in those segments would fall. The question is, would the demand in new ventures and markets increase enough to completely neutralize losing those segments? That remains to be seen—with a field as young and rapidly-evolving as software engineering, historical trends do not tell much about the future. [1] I should perhaps add that I am a mechanical engineer who also codes.