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Your comment about combining psychology and mathematics hit the nail on the head. Which is actually what I think the article was driving at. Although, since I'm no mathematician, I can't really envision what kind of direct impact mathematics could have... I could envision for example searching through codebases and statistically identifying common programming paradigms, then coming up with new types of shorthand notation (i.e. in the same way "for" and "while" are shortcuts for writing conditional loop commands by hand, a statistical analysis of code could allow us to find more areas in which new shortcuts would help). As far as the psychology goes, that's where I think computing is growing up right now in general, i.e. identifying ways to shorten learning curves for all aspects of computer usage. Right now it's most visible outside of the "coding" spectrum, in the field of UI design, but of course IDE's use UI's too, so I think they'll be seeing changes along with everything else.

Despite the naysayers, I agree with the author that programming truly can be improved to the point where more and more can be programmed by non-programmers. And despite the naysayers again, I'll risk the flames by saying I think Microsoft is, and has always been, on the cutting edge of this. Basic, and now Visual Basic has always been THE programming language for non-programmers, and it continues to evolve to incorporate new developments found in other programming languages. Unfortunately, especially since the first .NET version, the syntax and keywords have become more and more convoluted to accompany the added features, to the point where it degrades the simplicity that made Basic so wonderful in the first place. Microsoft really needs to get rid of all the long-ass keywords and types... Aside from that, the major problem with Visual Basic is that it's always been considered too slow and unreliable for large projects, and that's probably a justified opinion.

But I think it's headed in the right direction, and as of now Microsoft probably has the best lead in bringing programming to the masses...

Of course, what would be even more important and desirable than a MS-dominated beginner's product line is if we could get programming integrated into education. Imagine what a world we could have with that many more programmers able to contribute to open-source programs! Imagine how much faster software development, and even the development of software-development environments, would take place with that many more people capable of doing it! This is perhaps much more important than attempting to make a new programming paradigm or inventing a new, super-easy to learn "Esperanto" of programming lanuages.