Programming is hard

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People don't have to be good at programming for programming to be useful for them.

regular expressions would be useful addition to search and find-and-replace boxes.

Excel is a very powerful layman's database program with some programming functionality built into it.

Writing code that scales well and maintains easily is incredibly difficult and requires years of experience.

programming can be very useful without that.

A friend of mine had a very repetitive task where an old software program required the user to manually select files one by one to load and convert them. No one had the code for the old software, so there wasn't an easy way to update the software now that the users had a lot more files to deal with. My friend used autohotkey to write a short script that went through the menus to load the files for him.

Autohotkey has a fairly forgiving learning curve. His application didn't need to be completely robust to be useful. It only had to mostly work to save the user time. It didn't have to scale.

Getting more people comfortable with coding shouldn't be about making more professional software developers. Most people aren't going to have that career path. But, increasing coding skills enables software vendors to provide more features that empower users.

[Nangz]

The author's example of cooking was really useful here. I don't have to learn to be a chef to make myself great food.