Barriers to Successful End-User Programming

In my research and my personal life, I have come to know numerous people that our research community might call end-user programmers. Some of them are scientists, some are artists, others are educators and other types of professionals. One thing that all of these people have in common is that their goals are entirely unrelated to producing code. In some cases, programming may be a necessary part of accomplishing their goals, such as a physicist writing a simulation in C or an interaction designer creating an interactive prototype. In other cases, programming may simply be the more efficient alternative to manually solving a problem: one might find duplicate entries in an address book by visual search or by writing a short Perl script.