My point was not that they wouldn't be able to learn it, only that the tools and methods of design have changed and become much more automated. That process has not stopped, only accelerated. The people in this article are saying that the process of making software in 50 years will be very different from the modern method. It will rely heavily on automation and what was done manually by writing in programming languages will be integrated into systems in which the intent of the designer is interpreted by a machine. You can see it in IDEs today. They already analyze and interpret code. This is extremely primitive compared to what we will have on 50 years. The progress of machine intelligence is clear and doesn't require any major breakthroughs to continue for the foreseeable future. It will be as irresponsible for most people to write everything manually in 50 years as it is not to use a debugger today. No doubt there will be people doing things the same way, just like we have traditional blacksmiths today, but we will not have billions of people typing into terminals in 50 years. The criticism is against the idea that in the future, everyone will need to learn how to code in the same way as everyone needs basic arithmetic. That is not a plausible version of the future. It's trending the other way, more automation, more code reuse, less manual entry.