Hiding the complexity behind nice interfaces makes it actually more difficult to understand programming.

This is a very important point, that most of my colleagues with OOP background seem to miss. They build a bunch of abstractions and then say it's easy, because we have one liner in calling code, pretending that the rest of the code doesn't exist. Oh yes, it certainly exists! And needs to be maintained, too.

I find this to be a real problem with visual shaders. I know how certain mathematical formulas affect an input, but instead of just pressing the Enter key and writing it down, I now have to move blocks around, and oh no, they were nicely logically aligned, now one block is covering another block, oh noo, what a mess and the auto sort thing messes up the logical sorting completly… well too bad.

And I find that most solutions on the internet utilizing the visual editor tend to forget that previous outputs can be reused. Getting normals from already generated noise without resampling somehow becomes arcane knowledge.

Edit: words.

the general public has failed to learn programming

That's like saying that the general public has failed to learn surgery, or the general public has failed to learn chemical engineering.

There are certain things that it just doesn't make sense for the general public to ever be expected to learn.

What if the 2030s change the approach and use AI to teach everybody how to program?

What does AI (already known to be an unreliable bullshitting machine) provide to students that existing tutorials, videos and teachers do not already?

Also the companies investing in AI are not trying to teach their workers to be better, they're trying to make more profit by replacing workers or artificially increasing their outputs. Teaching people to program is not what they care about

I'm afraid I cant let you do that, Dave.

You've not read the manual.