The Database Programmer: Minimize Code, Maximize Data: an excellent description of something I’ve learned as I’ve worked with game development tools over the last 10 years (warning: quickly becomes SQL-focused). It always distinguishes game makers who come from an art/design background and game makers who come from an engineering/scripting background.
Non-programmers only have data to work with so they solve their design problems by pushing different/more data into a fixed toolset. Programmers solve design problems by writing software. Unfortunately, the way software ecosystems work, the data-side of the equation is less error-prone and is the fastest to iterate on.
One thing we’ve tried to do with Mockingbird is build a game development toolset for non-programmers. Not folks who don’t program (yet), but non-programmers — folks who won’t ever be (by choice) programmers. HTML does the same thing (which Mockingbird is closely modeled after). That’s one of the big reasons “it works.”