> I think we as programmers vastly understimate how useful even basic programming would be to virtually anyone today. I used to work in second-level support. O

> I think we as programmers vastly understimate how useful even basic programming would be to virtually anyone today. I used to work in second-level support. Out of a department of maybe 12, I think 2 of us knew how to program. I hate to even begin to describe some of the things I saw people trying to do by hand, and we were a software development company. I remember pleading with this one guy, "Please, before you ever try to do something like that again, come find me and ask if there is a way to automate the job." There are so many people that would stand to benefit if only they had so much exposure to programming that they could tell when it would be crazy to not grab the guy next to them and ask if a quick script might not turn a 2-day job into 1 hour's worth of work -- coding, testing, debugging, and execution all included. Sadly, even people (nominally) in technology jobs are ignorant of this.