This sounds like a good rationale for increasing usage of domain-specific languages. I assume this is why software like Matlab and Mathematica (and even more d

This sounds like a good rationale for increasing usage of domain-specific languages. I assume this is why software like Matlab and Mathematica (and even more domain-specific packages built on top of them) are very popular within many scientific disciplines - it allows those only interested in programming to achieve a very specific task to ignore many of the "programming" tasks and instead express problems and solutions in a way that is more familiar. This doesn't invalidate the claim that people need to be able to think "computationally", of course.