There are some fairly aspirational claims about how it might be different in this paper, which is a great read:

http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf

There has already been some significant progress on this front. E.g., SQL and logic programming let you describe what you want to happen, and let the computer figure out some of the details. Any compiler worth using does this, too. Smarter machines and smarter programs will mean smarter programming languages.