Programming vs. That Thing Subject Matter Experts Do.

Allowing subject matter experts to directly contribute their domain knowledge and expertise to software through DSLs and automation is a promising way to increase overall software development efficiency and the quality of the product. However, there are doubts of whether this will force subject matter experts to become programmers. In this paper I answer this question with “no”. But at the same time, subject matter experts have to learn how to communicate clearly and unambiguously to a computer, and this requires some aspects of what is traditionally called programming. The main part of this paper discusses what these aspects are and why learning these does not make people programmers.