[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.