Traditional desktop interfaces will survive, but they will survive in the same way that, say, Emacs survives -- as a niche product for that tiny market segment, not as the default way the Teeming Millions interact with their personal tech.
We should strive to support open protocols instead of closed APIs which are controlled by single companies.
Then everybody can use whatever User Interface they prefer and everbody can come up with new User Interfaces any time.
The AIM/ICQ/MSN vs. XMPP world illustrates this principle. Even if someone supports the closed protocols with a multi protocol client, the support eventually gets deliberately broken by the controlling party.
Protocols are way more important than the currently popular implementation of it.
Hm, but only as long as the saturation of "computers" is increasing rapidly. If you were to focus on a developed country with good smart phone penetration, I think it's possible that the percentage of coders is increasing as old people die and young people take to new technology more readily. I guess maybe it depends on where you draw the line between power user/script kiddie/programmer.
I doubt this statement. The number of people that write code is bound to increase in the future, not become smaller. And that has (among other things) to do with mobile devices getting cheaper and more capable. And generally with further increase of automation / software complexity. And with more people that want to be producers instead of consumers in the computer age...
There has been over 30 years of research and field experience with the WIMP paradigm. The code bases (source trees) for the three most "popular" (most relied-on) desktop OSes are over 20 years old. (Yes, I know that the code base for Windows XP and later differs from that of Windows 98 and earlier, but the code base for XP and later, namely, the NT code base, is itself over 20 years old if you count the final 18 months or so of its pre-release development.) I concede that there is a good chance that iOS and Android and Windows Metro will eventually kill the desktop OS, but that is going to take another 10 years and probably significantly longer.
There is no inherent reason that people need to use a virtual desktop, remote controlled by a mouse. The desktop metaphors, overlapping windows, cascading menus, constant nagging popups, files and folders, hardware drivers, blue screens... all this stuff is a nightmare for average users. They are already abandoning the desktop model because it never worked very well.
Then we can forget about windows/osx/gnome/kde/...