This has been a professional concern for me for many years. I lead grad students with no programming experience into making their own tools for research and sha

This has been a professional concern for me for many years. I lead grad students with no programming experience into making their own tools for research and sharing. I've completely given up on learning a programming ecosystem and building programs from scratch. Rather, I work within applications that can be scripted to a task. I envy the engineering students for whom Matlab is enough, because that seems to be the closest modern equivalent of Visual Basic. Mathematica is sort of there, but much harder to learn and not easily shareable.