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? replies(7):