And when UML started getting in vogue in the mid 90s a lot of people said that "intelligent code generators" would automate a large amount of programming.
It did not happen the way people predicted, but it has somehow happened in the form of Angular, Ionic, Express, Ruby-on-Rails and similar frameworks: More and more programming means "writing glue code", being it to glue Machine Learning libraries (yay, ML developer!), HTTP libraries (yay, Web developer!), AMQP/SQL/NoSQL (yay, backend developer!) or even OpenGL/DirectX/SDL (yay, game developer!).
The fact is, as more and more of these abstraction libraries are created, "programming" will go one level of abstraction up, but still need people to do it.
In 2002 the inventor of Microsoft Office (Charles Simonyi) took his $billions and left to create a company to replace programming with an Office-like app. In 2017 the company (Intentional) was acquihired back into MS after failing to generate a profit or popular product.
It did not happen the way people predicted, but it has somehow happened in the form of Angular, Ionic, Express, Ruby-on-Rails and similar frameworks: More and more programming means "writing glue code", being it to glue Machine Learning libraries (yay, ML developer!), HTTP libraries (yay, Web developer!), AMQP/SQL/NoSQL (yay, backend developer!) or even OpenGL/DirectX/SDL (yay, game developer!).
The fact is, as more and more of these abstraction libraries are created, "programming" will go one level of abstraction up, but still need people to do it.