Author: Leo Porter, Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego

What do you think there are more of: professional computer programmers or computer users who do a little programming? It’s the second group. There are millions of so-called end-user programmers. They’re not going into a career as a professional programmer or computer scientist. They’re going into business, teaching, law, or any number of professions – and they just need a little programming to be more efficient. The days of programmers being confined to software development companies are long gone. If you’ve written formulas in Excel, filtered your email based on rules, modded a game, written a script in Photoshop, used…