The trick is to get them programming without them even realizing they're doing it. There's examples of this working effectively: millions of people can use exc

The trick is to get them programming without them even realizing they're doing it. There's examples of this working effectively: millions of people can use excel to perform computations on groups of cells - the formulae they're entering include basic programming constructs like assignment, selection, loops, etc - yet it's not presented as a "programming system", which otherwise seems to put people off. I recall reading an anecdote about the TECO editor (or some other emacs predecessor). Where the editor was being used by secretaries and other non-programmers, but they'd have no problems configuring it with the documentation they had available - they were never told that they were actually programming when they were doing so. Perhaps it's a bit much to give the user a full-blown programming language for their configuration and expect them to have no problems, but it seems like limited programming concepts can be learned by just about anyone if presented in the right way.