In a message of Sat, 26 May 2007 03:46:25 CDT, Jeff Rush writes:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/Advocacy/ProgrammingForNewprogrammers

I call that group "new programmers" - somehow calling them normal or average folk seems mildly insulting to someone, and calling them "non-programmers" isn't accurate if our goal is to teach them programming, albeit non-vocational style. "Non-professional programmers"? "Typical" people? "Making People Programming-Literate"?

-Jeff

Dorai Thodla suggests 'beginners'. And perhaps that would work. But my initial reaction was negative. It may simply be that I find the labelling of people that distasteful. In my world, labelling is well-associated with building rigid and discriminatory class structures,though 'beginner' seems relatively free of this particular poison. But that may be its own rub. 'Beginner' is a stage which one goes through on the way to something else, while I think that Jeff is looking for something that could well be permanent -- what Anna Martelli Ravenscroft called (calls?) 'for the rest of us'. She too was stuck on the 'but what would I do with it' question. The thing is that this sort of thing seems to be orthagonal to becoming a professional programmer. I know some professional programmers who don't think that programming is fun. They only do it for work, when they are paid for it. (Admittedly, they don't use python). So they don't have a box of helpful programs they have written over time to automate some tedium out of their lives, even though they are well equipped with the skills to do so. But most of us have these quick hacks lying all around. And they are the sort of thing that could appeal to professional programmers and non-programmers alike, because they solve the sort of probelms that everybody has, not the sort that only professional software developers call 'work'. Laura