Oh come on. A couple years ago I was able to teach a college friend, a political science student, who had never done a lick of programming, and who had last taken a math course in high school, enough Python to scrape down data from a bunch of websites and do some simple analysis on it, in about 2 hours.<p>Granted, he's a smart guy, and obviously he should really spend a few weeks or months learning the ins and outs if he wants to get especially sophisticated, but seriously, these things are essential for anyone with any kind of research or curation job ... and frankly for anyone: so much of our society runs on searching and sorting through masses of data that it’s important to understand just to know what’s going on, even for those uninterested in answering their own questions.