I partly agree. It's not usually a great success - programming is still hard, even if the language is specialized for the problem domain.

But maybe it's not entirely hopeless.

• I work with a number of designers and quite some testers that can use SQL to get useful results (surely not optimized queries or three levels of joins).
• With a bit of training, testers can write automated integration tests using some wrapper software around Selenium.

Arguably it's a bit of a fall-back option that's only used because programmers are expensive and hard to find, but that's just the current way of things...

That said, I feel languages like SQL, XML and CSS are useful mostly because they are adapted to the problem domain fairly well. Being somewhat usable by non-progammers is a side benefit at best.