Maybe, maybe not. I can certainly write straightforward little algorithms, but I always get lost when I want to hook them up to anything useful (writing algorithms is still hard, though, especially if you don’t do it constantly but only from time to time).<p>There is no easy way to do this at the moment. Not if you want to ignore details, just write something and have it work. The best I can do at the moment is guess if something is possible to do, guess the amount of work and tell someone (who’s an expert) what to do.<p>You are probably right about scientists, though. It’s a pain to see social scientists working with the mess that is called SPSS when r is so cool. I don’t know why that is but when toying around with r I feel for the first time that I am able to actually do something useful with what I know about programming.