Will the future be programmer-free?

It's an interesting sociological phenomenon: People who sit there, programming, right in front of you, yet all the while insisting that they aren't programmers and that what they're doing is certainly not programming.

I suspect that, in the long term, programming will be like writing. A majority of people are able to do it at some level, but they never think of themselves as "writers". A sizeable number of people are employed as pro writers and label themselves as such, and there are a decent number of superstar writers who are highly paid and at least moderately famous.

Incidentally, I agree with you that this article is yet another entry in that unkillable genre: the sales pitch for a 4GL silver bullet. People have been writing these for at least two or three decades.