I think he's talking about how scripting is less and less possible on Mac/Windows, and practically impossible on phones, which is where the bulk of computing will be done in the future.
Be careful there - the bulk of computing is always in the background - the consumption of the results of that computing may move towards phones.
Take banking as an example, pulling up your bank balance, or making an online payment, is nowhere near the computing power of actually balancing the transactions at all banks across the world each night. You get a tiny sliver of a tiny report of the computing that happens in the background.
Entertainment, personal tools, communication - those are moving mobile. But that is just the surface.
History lesson: It never was possible on 3270 smart terminals, either.
We've had a shift back to centralized data storage and processing.
There were a few decades - the 1980s & 1990s & 2000s - where the canonical master of a data set might have been local to the user, but cloud computing has moved data back to DCs for centralized storage & processing. And we are using very smart terminals.
Even in those years, the client/server model was the norm. Except for people using MS Access, or similar fiascos, there was always a centralized data store.
That doesn't invalidate the claim that scripting is dying. Sure, us tech folk can (and do) script all kinds of things, even even more so the Enterprise IT world, who practically lives and dies by powershell. But back in the 90s in particular, there were such a thing as "power users", who would script the crap out of their systems. That really doesn't exist so much anymore. Now people in that grey area between end users and the coders are more likely to be professional business analysts. The days of a true end user also creating their own custom scripts to merge data and functions from disparate apps is getting rare.
(Keep in mind, HN is an entire community of edge cases... of course we all can spit out exceptions to this trend.)
Now, I do not think this is a bad thing. On the contrary, most of those people were very hard to support, and the ones who did it well and were easy to support often ended up moving into IT/Analyst roles anyway. I think we are in a better place today, with a much larger population of coders and analysts, so the end users can just tell us what they need, then focus on the actual jobs.
But the claim that end user scripting is dying... Yep, I do agree with that much.
One of the first things I install in any Windows machine I'll be using on a regular basis is Python. Helps "unlock" a lot of potential from the computer (through scripting, obviously).
On Linux machines I don't have to install because it's already there :P
