We need tools that bring the learning curve down and allow people to develop their own basic tools to make their lives easier, while storing the data on a central location.
Amazing things have been done in Excel, but have you ever seen a department have locking issues? "Can you close the spreadsheet so I can get in?"
Yeah, we need multiuser excel, or perhaps a google docs equivalent that can be hosted internally.
This won't achieve much because the issue is that most people can't think about the problems they face in a structured way.
Modern programming isn't hard, all you need to learn is a handful of control structures and how to do I/O, and there are a multitude of tools to take away the tedious bits.
But if you can't describe the problem you are trying to solve in a structured way than no non-AI tool will help.
P.S. I remember being considered a Wizard in a non-technical university course because I looked up some Excel tutorials and built a spreadsheet with some basic calculations and graphing. This wasn't technically hard, but most of my classmates lacked the ability to comprehend the relationships between different cells and tables in Excel.
Enabling people to become critical thinkers is a much bigger problem than just programming: programming will always require critical thinking.
Making programming a computer easier is a difficult problem to solve but very solvable as long as we assume that programmers are critical thinkers.
"Coding" will never go away before AI because at some point you need to formally express the design you have thought up. It doesn't really matter if you do that with arcane syntax, symbols, or "natural" language.
It sounds like you are saying, and I'm not disagreeing with you, that the act of speaking required coding.
That is, speaking is taking input from the senses and memory, converting that input into a natural language (coding/encoding) through thought and saying the final thought out loud.
How does this help in understanding the differences between typing out syntax, manipulating symbols, expression using natural language or AI using it's own coding approaches?
Attempts to create "natural" language programming haven't worked because actual natural languages are too informal and imprecise for simple algorithmic comprehension.
A system that can comprehend natural language and turn imprecise specifications into a program should be an AI.
Building giant spreadsheets is easy though. I don't think programming is for everyone, but more people could learn than today.
Welcome to seven versions and seventeen years ago: http://www.techonthenet.com/excel/questions/shared.php
I was thinking more of a access/excel fusion that has a more robust backend, but sure.