"blah blah tycho says he's not a programmer, blah blah." I say stuff like this (more or less) quite a bit, right? But I know a lot about how computers work, a lot about how programs are constructed (at least in the abstract,) and while I've not (really) written code of any note I do read a bunch of code, and can almost always figure out how things work. So I suppose I should confess that I'm... working on learning how to program (in my copious free time).
I, of course, will keep you posted about this as it progresses, but for now I'll settle to just explain the origin of this development: I started using emacs a few months ago, and I found the lisp-dialect that serves as emacs' extension language to be quite understandable. Maybe it's something about how emacs programs are written to be hacked on, and even poorly documented emacs-lisp is rather well documented. I read the beginning of an introduction to haskell, and I think it has something to do with the functional aspects of the language. In any case, something clicked, and so here I am.