I think you mis-understood me (it is easy to do as I am seldom clear). You see I lecture computational biology and algorithmics to biologists (and computer scientists). I am very commited to the idea of biologists learning CS ideas. In fact the University of Auckland has a Bioinformatics degree program that teaches computer science, mathematics, statistics and biology all to final year (you have to be an extremely good student to master all of those areas!). The point is: not every biologist can be a top notch programmer. Understanding CS principles is very different from being able to write 100,000 lines of object-oriented statistical inference software. I want to lower the barrier that currently exists to scientists doing sophisticated science. I would not call Geneious a “visual programming environment” — it is a productivity tool (like Eclipse is for programmers). At some point in the future it will probably have scripting — but you should be aware that most biologists are not going to write scripts. At least not *this* generation of biologists. I have been programming since I was 8, and I will continue to do so till I am 80 — but IMHO you are short-sighted if you think that everyone will need to know how to program to do science in the future. Maybe I pushed your button by saying that I want to program myself out of a job. That was just hyperbole. Of course there is a growing need for computer scientists — that just reflects that exponentially growing data-rich world we live in.

Alexei