Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered:

    * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries
      from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that)
    * Instant feedback - run the query get useful results
    * Compilation step with some type safety - will complain
      if their query is malformed
    * Are tables a "natural" way to think about data for humans?
    * Job relevance

Any ideas? Can we learn from that example to make real programming environments that are more "cross functional" in that more people in a company are willing to use them?

>>I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming

Thats barely programming. Even by the most lenient definition what they do isn't programming.

Firstly SQL's are a little like Excel Macros, they lower the barrier to entry to basic twiddling. Got a SQL client(Toad etc?)? you can throw a snippet or two quickly. Anything beyond that gets difficult. Tricky joins, sub queries, troubleshooting big queries, optimization problems etc etc. Beyond this writing re usable code, test discipline and a range of other tasks that make code run for years is what is your everyday work as a programmer.

Sure you could saw a log of wood once a while, but don't confuse that for being a full time carpenter.