"Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners" should not learn programming. Instead they should hire programmers or the technology should provide them tools suited to them. You don't solve problems by changing roles.

I may be missing something but I'm surprised that nobody raised the security issue of putting an man-in-the-middle able to disassemble the expected code and replace it by its own. What about signatures in this stuff?

Sure but the majority of developped applications are not system-related, but rather system-neutral. You want to provide services, functionnality, nothing else. Performance is about lower layers, which are today already quite optimized, and will be more and more in the future. System-level programming is no longer a future for people that want to provide business-level software.