I don't think "average database/object driven applications" constitute the majority of programming, and I strongly suspect that Microsoft Office is not as trivi

I don't think "average database/object driven applications" constitute the majority of programming, and I strongly suspect that Microsoft Office is not as trivial as you say :-) See Joel's article on the "five worlds of programming": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html Each "world" has intricacies that people from other worlds aren't aware of, and there are likely more worlds than just these five.