I think there will be types of software that folks will be able to bark orders into their microphone and have the computer barf out software. Maybe an iTunes app creator. "Make it pink! Ok, now put the play bar on the left. No wait, the right. A little more. Good, right there. Now I want my playlist to be black with yellow text and put pretty stars everywhere."

In engineering land, we continue to get better tools for building certain type of applications. Ruby on Rails has shown us the benefits of constrained thinking. A blog in 10 minutes! But Rails only excels at building one type of application, standard fare web apps, with loads of standard database-driven tables/forms.

It's very very hard to generalize programming. We have a long way to go still. Software gets the job done today, but often, it's not pretty and often fights against the user.