Does anyone have experience in teaching Clojure to "non-programmers" such as admins, accountants and similar? Especially for smaller businesses?
From what I've gathered there might be an opportunity in related fields, where people are doing very difficult and tedious things manually such as lots data entry, migrating data from legacy systems to new ones, think Excel to specialised applications, comparing and visually testing a lot of minutiae and so on.
For many of these kinds of things there aren't necessarily good general solutions, depending on scale of course. But in SMBs etc were talking about a couple of weeks, maybe months of manual work versus two days of scripting and testing. Think hundreds to low thousands of datasets.
In these cases the cost/overhead of bringing in developers might not always be a good trade off. Because many of those tasks aren't repeatable and the scale is not big enough to warrant more than ad-hoc programming.
I assume there is often one person (1/5 or 1/10 or so) that has the chops to learn some programming to automate these kinds of tasks.
I have a specific case in my close circle and we've talked about this a couple of times. We're going to try and teach her a little bit of programming to see where this is going. My initial hunch was to use Python, but it seems like Clojure might be an even better fit if I set up the environment and write some building blocks that do the I/O stuff with some of the common applications/formats/APIs they are using (too tedious and overwhelming for beginners).
