"Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python."

Downwards in terms of language design though, you can add JavaScript to the end of that sequence to make it even more obvious. Otherwise we would've been using a some sort of sane syntax version of Haskell by now. If software is "eating" 'whatever' then computers should be doing more for you not less, hence even more pre-runtime checking, not less.

"... allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. ... these tools act as a force multiplier for the software industry."

Multiplying the code mess professional developers will then have to maintain? Example: converting Excel and Access spaghetti into sane programming models in finance.