An interesting question, one which many have thought of, not only you. We've come a long way from punch cards to almost English-like scripting and query languages. Once the domain of only professional programmers, building programs is now a hobby for many with little or no formal training in programming. That said, there's a huge difference between building controller firmware and code to transfer money from one account to another. But I digress, the original question had to do with programming languages, and there I must agree with a lot of what's being said, in that, so long as it remains the domain of mathematics, it's unlikely that it will become too abstracted from text based methods. I come from the Assembly and C world, and the new 4GL languages aren't that exciting for me. But that's me, and I'm pretty much on my way out.