"Now you download Unity and almost everything but the art design and game logic is done for you."
Yes, Unity helps to visually organize your game's data, and there are built in and downloadable components (which are all created by coders) that can be used to plug into your game, but it's just another set of abstractions. Most of the time you will be writing your own components in a traditional coding language or delving into other's component code to adapt it to actually make your game function. There ARE game creation systems intended for no coding required, but they come with the expected limitations of visual coding that people are bringing up in this thread. No, Unity doesn't really fall into this category, barring a few limited game domains.
Perhaps in 50 years every domain will be "mapped" in this way, with predefined components that work with each other and can be tweaked as needed, but I don't see how that could eliminate coding, or even displace it that much. Two reasons I think coding is here to stay:
1) Any sufficiently complex system needs it's organization to be managed. At a certain complexity, whatever system is replacing coding will become something that looks a lot like coding. At that level of complexity, text is easier to manage than a visual metaphor.
2) Most pieces of software need custom components, even if only to stand out. Those game creation systems with no coding? No one is impressed by the games that are created in those systems. Not because the system cannot produce something worthwhile - but because with everything looking the same, the value of that output drops substantially.
I think coding will only go away when programming does. When the computer is as intelligent and creative as we are. And that's a point which I do not want think about too much.
I think we'll reach that point in 50 years because we already have computers with certain types of intelligence that exceed ours. Translating a human intent into machine language does work with coding, but we have to admit that it's not ideal. There are too many mistakes and vulnerabilities. Even the smartest people create bugs.
This like the shift in transportation. A lot of people love driving and mistrust autonomous vehicles. But the tech is almost to the point where it's safer than human drivers. In most situations, it already is.
Another comparison would be SaaS. For a lot of companies, it's about risk mitigation. Moving responsibilities away from internal staff makes business sense in many cases.
This is a criticism of the idea that we need to make coding a basic life skill that everyone should focus on. It looks a lot like denial to some people.
Let's go back to transportation. Imagine if people were pushing the idea that commercial driving needs to be in every high school because driving was such a big employment area. Some people might say that the autonomous vehicles look like a big threat to job prospects, so maybe it's not such a good idea to focus on those particular skills.
Coding is great, provides a lot of opportunities to the people that it attracts, but it's a pretty specialized skill that's going to be increasingly displaced by more natural and automatic interfaces this century in all likelihood.
Yes, Unity helps to visually organize your game's data, and there are built in and downloadable components (which are all created by coders) that can be used to plug into your game, but it's just another set of abstractions. Most of the time you will be writing your own components in a traditional coding language or delving into other's component code to adapt it to actually make your game function. There ARE game creation systems intended for no coding required, but they come with the expected limitations of visual coding that people are bringing up in this thread. No, Unity doesn't really fall into this category, barring a few limited game domains.
Perhaps in 50 years every domain will be "mapped" in this way, with predefined components that work with each other and can be tweaked as needed, but I don't see how that could eliminate coding, or even displace it that much. Two reasons I think coding is here to stay:
1) Any sufficiently complex system needs it's organization to be managed. At a certain complexity, whatever system is replacing coding will become something that looks a lot like coding. At that level of complexity, text is easier to manage than a visual metaphor. 2) Most pieces of software need custom components, even if only to stand out. Those game creation systems with no coding? No one is impressed by the games that are created in those systems. Not because the system cannot produce something worthwhile - but because with everything looking the same, the value of that output drops substantially.
I think coding will only go away when programming does. When the computer is as intelligent and creative as we are. And that's a point which I do not want think about too much.