It's interesting to see so many developers demanding an easier way to test whether a website is accessible.
> Show me a virtual machine that I can test with, that puts me in the shoes of a user w/ a disability, and I'll develop with accessibility in mind.
> Well to be honest I can test my code in IE9 to see if it works. But I have no idea how a disabled person is experiencing my website, I do put all the "alt" attributes etc...but it's hard to imagine it.
Turn off your monitor. Turn your laptop brightness all the way down. That's what it's like to use your website while blind. Basic screenreaders for the web cost zero dollars and could not be easier to install [0]. A screenreader for Mac OS [1] costs zero dollars and is already installed on your machine.
Stop pretending that these tools are mysterious. You or someone you know might have no choice but to become an expert screenreader user tomorrow. Have a little bit of compassion.
There's no conflict between reading and understanding a codebase and seeing the value in a diagram. You can have both. Take a look at the example you chose: [0] and [1] (about a third of the way down).
They first explained PageRank (without a diagram), then explained the flow of the data from the crawler (with a diagram). You seem to be arguing that diagrams are never useful, and that just isn't true.
Take this with a grain of salt. I found working on Quartz to be much more miserable than any other platform I've ever worked with. Of course, that had to do with a lot of factors that weren't related to the language.
I don't doubt the usefulness of programming to the non-technologist, but Excel proficiency can be even more useful. It's so much more than just a container for CSVs!
Just for the record: I used Python at work because I had to; I'd rather have been writing Java.
The titanic investment bank that I used to work for started a major rewrite of its entire set of booking and risk systems in which everything was to be written in Python. It immediately assigned hundreds of programmers to the task, shepherded by a "core team" eager to use every feature of the language. The result was a perfect example of the problems with Python in the large. Enormous type hierarchies mingled with copious use of eval; there was no structure at all to much of the code.
It's possible to write terrible code in any language, of course, but using Java would have been one way to curb some of the worst impulses of the low-quality programmers.
