What do we call to "non-programmers" ? ( Like "muggle" in HP ) [closed]

Posted by OscarRyz on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by OscarRyz
Published on 2011-02-11T09:01:53Z Indexed on 2011/02/11 15:32 UTC
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Sometimes I want to refer to people without coding powers as Muggles. But it doesn't quite feel right.

Gamers have n00b ( but still a n00b has some notion of gaming )

I mean, for all those who Windows in the only OS in the world ( what's an OS ? would they ask )

For project manager who can't distinguish between excel and a database. For those who exclaim "Wooow! when you show them the ctrl-right click to see the webpage source code.

What would be a good word to describe to these "persons without lack of coding ability?"

Background

I didn't mean to be disrespectful with ordinary people.

It's just, sometimes it drives me nuts seeing coworkers struggling trying to explain to these "people" some concept.

For instance, recently we were asked, what a "ear" was (in Java). My coworker was struggling on how to explain what is was, and how it differ from .war, .jar, etc. and talking about EJB's application server, deployment etc, and our "people"1 was like o_O. I realize a better way to explain was "Think about it as an installer for the application, similar to install.exe" and he understood immediately. This is none's fault, it is sometimes our "poeple" come from different background, that's it. Is our responsibility to talk at a level they can understand, some coworkers, don't get it and try very hard to explain programming concepts ( like the source code in the browser ).

But I get the point, we I don't need to be disrespectful.

... But, I'm considering call them pebkac's

1As suggested

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