> I think the author is not talking about career programming. Yes, and I'll be honest and say that I missed that to begin with. The author is also not a devel

> I think the author is not talking about career programming. Yes, and I'll be honest and say that I missed that to begin with. The author is also not a developer, which is why he is mistaken on a number of specifics. I think concentrating on those specifics miss the point of what he's trying to relate. I think the barrier to start coding is incredibly low at the moment though. There are so many learning resources and even websites that provide a full stack including a web based ide. The barrier to doing it completely on your own hardware may be slightly higher than it used to be because everything requires so much customizability that it ends up being difficult to operate. Of course there are simpler option out there but they don't get as much press as the more capable tools. I don't think he solved the crux of his excel problem though: excel provides an easy way of coding, providing the input for the code, and presenting the results in productive manner. Most environments make this fairly painful for the beginner, requiring you to parse text files or similar. This allows beginner excel users to be productive quickly. Of course, baking node into the browser isn't going to solve that.