Even little nuggets from programming, gifted in the right way can radically change things for non-programmers. I introduced a friend to regular expressions and Textpad so he could cleanup the output from a news reporting system he used (excess line breaks, weird characters, that sort of thing). It turned a manual task that took him the bulk of his time into something that took seconds.
When I showed him a related tool that could hunt out and tag terms of interest using the same concept (phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) it completely changed his life. He ended up using those two little kernels of wisdom to mostly automate a previously entirely manual research process and now leads a team of 20 researchers in his field.
He's not a programmer or even a scripter, but he uses regexes pretty much every day in his work.
When I showed him a related tool that could hunt out and tag terms of interest using the same concept (phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) it completely changed his life. He ended up using those two little kernels of wisdom to mostly automate a previously entirely manual research process and now leads a team of 20 researchers in his field.
He's not a programmer or even a scripter, but he uses regexes pretty much every day in his work.