This article seems to be responding to the strawman argument that all code will be replaced by visual tools. I don't think this is true, any more than that high

This article seems to be responding to the strawman argument that all code will be replaced by visual tools. I don't think this is true, any more than that high level programming languages have replaced all uses of assembly language. At the end of the day, there are applications that care enough about performance that you need to hire someone who deeply understands the microarchitecture of your chip. That said, Excel has largely replaced traditional text based languages in a significant set of domains, and I don't see any reason that pattern can't be repeated elsewhere. There was a time when summing a bunch of data required a "programmer" and today that is only true for unusually large datasets. You can certainly define Excel to be a programming language, but it doesn't feel that way to most of it's users.