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 teach SQL to my journalism students. Example exercise:

http://2015.padjo.org/tutorials/sql-walks/exploring-wsj-medi...

My main reason for teaching it was that it was a skill that helped me immensely as a journalist, in terms of being able to do data analysis. Because I learned it relatively late in my career, I thought it'd be hard for the students but most of them are able to get it.

Even though I use relatively little SQL in my day to day work, it's my favorite thing to teach to novices. First, it has a similar data model to spreadsheets, so it feels like a natural progression. Secondly, for many students, this is the first time that they'll have done "real" programming and the first time that they learn how to tell a computer to do something rather than learn how to use a computer. In Excel, for example, you double click a file and the entire thing opens. With SQL, you're required to not just specify the database and table, but also each and every column...it's annoying at first, but then you realize that there is power in being explicit.

The main advantage of teaching SQL over, say R, as a first language is that SQL's declarative syntax is easy to follow AND you can do most of what you need with a limited subset of the language...for instance, I don't have to teach variables and loops and functions...which is good because I don't even know how to really do those in SQL (just haven't had the need when I can work from R or Pandas).

When a beginner student fucks up a basic Python script, there are any number of reasons for the failure that is beyond the student's expected knowledge. When a novice student fucks up a SQL query...it's easier to blame the mistake on the student (e.g. Misspelling of names/syntax)