In The Labs Departments Discussion Dick Hardt Programming for the People Occasional programmers hold the key to computer efficiency.
Many common tasks are so mundane that they demand to be automated.
Computer programming is essentially a task-automation exercise, and in the new economy, task automation is more important then ever. If you meet these conditions, the remaining barriers to programming are computers and tools, both of which are subject to the usual time and money constraints. In the early days of computing, computers were large, centralized resources requiring specialized training to operate. These machines were so expensive that computer time was significantly more expensive than that of the people using the computer. Gradually, computers lowered in price, and the machines originally purchased for an entire corporation were finally cheap enough to share among one department.