A Small Matter of (Scientific) Programming

Why is it so hard for scientists in healthcare and biology to command programming power? Data has dominated the field for decades, and wave after wave of scientists have been exciting graduate students trained in informatics at some level. However, the field has (so far) successfully resisted network effects in data and systemic end-user programming as a day-to-day practice. If we are going to afford scientists real programming power, we need better software systems to support science at scale. It's just a small matter of programming.