It’s doubtful that he doesn’t understand some amount of programming. It’s impossible to graduate from EE without a couple of programming quarters/semesters, and these people did invent CUDA and such.
I'm not sure you're getting my implicit point, which is fair because I didn't spell it out. What programming is is not just getting a computer to do something. In many cases, that is the easy part. Programming is just as much if not more so understanding a domain and imparting that to a computer process. Thus, for an AI to be able to do that, we'd solve extra-human intelligence, as even most humans are terrible at system design.
Yes, I would guess that a EE understands how to program a computer to get it to do something. But that isn't all that programming is. So the CEO claiming that we can in the future program via human language is him failing to understand that we already fail at doing this.
