For certain areas, you can replace or drastically lower the entry barrier to programming, sure. Replace it totally? Doubtful. There's still inherent limits to

For certain areas, you can replace or drastically lower the entry barrier to programming, sure. Replace it totally? Doubtful. There's still inherent limits to computation that we have not resolved, and if our current hunches are correct, likely won't. COBOL was meant to make programming a negligible and easily doable task with its rigid English-like syntax, but how did that turn out? Sloppy code generators have been around for decades that can pop out some generic half-useful spaghetti abomination, but if you want anything just above total crap, you have to do it yourself. Things like databases? Sure. CRUD apps? Absolutely. Even if you don't have a GUI to generate them, there will likely be some extremely abstracted library where it's a matter of pasting in a few procedures. Yet a lot of things are still too vast and niche. That, and reaching the bug-free equilibrium. Removing state and side effects will deal with a wide class of bugs, but it obviously does not rid of them entirely. There will still be some just barely competent (or wizardlike by the hypothetical far-future standards) people who will be in charge of maintenance, and those will be our programmers. While programmers are certainly a peculiarity in that doing your job well means furthering your own extinction, I don't think it will be anywhere near as drastic as it's made out to be. An ever-breaking technological dystopia sounds much more likely than some clockwork ubiquitous computing society.