See I don't think coding can get any easier for the level of problem we are talking about here. The kind of small problems we seem to be talking about are the kind of thing that is within the realm of "scripting". You don't need a deep understanding of Computer Science or advanced data structures to write good enough code for those problems.
"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.
> "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?
No, I am saying that coding will always require some kind of formal expression, and that the difficulty of the grammar used is not the major barrier (as these issues can be dealt with by compilers and IDEs).
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.
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.