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I use the term lay programmer to mean someone who is programming
without thinking themselves as a programmer. Someone who spends a
large part of her day working on spreadsheets is doing programming,
often very intense programming. Usually however she won't call
herself a programmer, nor think of spending much time learning how
to program better. It's easy for professional programmers to get sniffy at lay
programmers, but lay programmers usually are domain experts who know
a great deal about what a program should do. Our challenge is to
think of ways to engage them more effectively in software
development, and provide tools that are easy for them to use, but
also capable of being well structured programs that can evolve
efficiently and integrate well into the wider software ecosystem.
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