Have you ever programmed in an assembly language? Moved bits between CPU registers? What about allocating memory in C? I don't think you're being fair to the amount of math computers are already hiding from us.
It's pretty cushy here in JavaScript-land (or Ruby-land/Python-land/etc), and it's easy to forget that a lot of the nice things we take for granted—like objects and duck typing and garbage collection—didn't always exist, and humans had to deal with these low-level maintenance things instead of just telling the computer what they wanted to happen. Think back just ten years: DOM manipulation involved a lot of complex logic until libraries like jQuery and Prototype made it accessible to everyone.
In a lot of ways, we're already moving beyond code in the way I think you're envisioning it, too. Apple's toolkit for building iOS apps includes graphical tools for building the interface, where you just drag and drop components the way you want them to appear onscreen. Services like Parse let you build backends without ever writing a line of code. We've actually been down this road with HTML and CSS, too—we had tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, but collectively decided that it was better to write our code by hand. We backpedaled away from this code-less future!
Ultimately, I think, we will move away from code for simple things like building apps. But it'll take time to get there… and there will always be something cooler and more complex that you do need code for.
Have you ever programmed in an assembly language? Moved bits between CPU registers? What about allocating memory in C? I don't think you're being fair to the amount of math computers are already hiding from us.
It's pretty cushy here in JavaScript-land (or Ruby-land/Python-land/etc), and it's easy to forget that a lot of the nice things we take for granted—like objects and duck typing and garbage collection—didn't always exist, and humans had to deal with these low-level maintenance things instead of just telling the computer what they wanted to happen. Think back just ten years: DOM manipulation involved a lot of complex logic until libraries like jQuery and Prototype made it accessible to everyone.
In a lot of ways, we're already moving beyond code in the way I think you're envisioning it, too. Apple's toolkit for building iOS apps includes graphical tools for building the interface, where you just drag and drop components the way you want them to appear onscreen. Services like Parse let you build backends without ever writing a line of code. We've actually been down this road with HTML and CSS, too—we had tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, but collectively decided that it was better to write our code by hand. We backpedaled away from this code-less future!
Ultimately, I think, we will move away from code for simple things like building apps. But it'll take time to get there… and there will always be something cooler and more complex that you do need code for.