[brandon_wirtz]

Your enthusiasm as great. But be aware by saying you think this is something you can do in a week you are telling the world you think programming is a semi-skilled job.

I learned to weld when I was 7. I can make art or patch up a broken plow. A real welder can make a boat because all his seams are water tight, and cam patch body work because his seams are so smooth. 27 years of welding as a hobby or for bits of maintenance and I am not a welder.

[cjbprime]

I don't think we need to be so inflexible about language -- there are plenty of people in the world who would like to pay someone to make straightforward websites (patching up broken plows?) rather than work on, say, a new in-kernel memory allocator (building a boat?). It would be pretty ridiculous to claim you have to be able to do the latter before you get to call yourself a programmer.

I think the truth is that programming is a field with work available for people of disparate skill levels and experience -- http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-somers-web... is a good article explaining some of why that is. It describes a friend of the author who went from being a law student to being a programmer with an $85k/year salary in six months; does that make programming semi-skilled? Where's the boundary?

[Dylan16807]

Be careful with that analogy: a lot of simple sites need zero code, or at least zero code that you need to ever see.

[krstck]

"Learn to program" doesn't necessarily mean "learn in a week to be a programming rockstar" (one of our favorites). If you're a smart person, you can pick up the basics of syntax, conditionals, simple methods. You can learn enough to bootstrap your way through a simple CRUD app. Hell, that's exactly what I did and now I'm being paid to do it.