I have to disagree ... there are a lot of folks who don't learn well being thrown in at the deep end of "mess around until you understand it", and for whom a Bretian visualization of data would be useful over and over again (especially for bugfinding). And what data needs to be visualized is different for different people; e.g., I can easily visualize most regex, but a lot of people love tools like Rubular because they can't. But I have a lot of trouble intuitively understanding functions like the graphical ones in Bret's examples.

As to "dumbing it down", I think programming can definitely have mass appeal, but there's a lot of "I had to learn closures uphill in the snow both ways" going on among seasoned programmers -- in the same way that current medical doctors often valorize their hours and hours of being on call as residents. A trial by fire may seem useful but in the end you just get a lot of burned people. But unlike MDs, there's no protective guild for programmers ...