The programmer's edition isn't just for programmers, it's for anyone who doesn't care for the frilly bits of the standard Willow edition. It's for the more hardcore of you whose heads and fingers work faster than Willow can present it's interface.
To be honest, we decided to call it the "Programmer's Edition" to draw the attention of programmers for whom the standard edition is likely to be met with a "pfft" and overlooked - but it's programmers, scripters, and any other writers of structured but complex text who have the most to gain from using Willow.
Believe it or not Willow development began as an internal tool to help us code faster, take tedium away from typing repetitive code structures and to help enforce coding standards. Text insertion tools and Xcode's user scripts don't go far enough in automating complex text generation. Xcode's user scripts are better suited to the job than text insertion tools but even if they were adequate they only work in Xcode, what if you use vi, emacs or anything else? What if your an internet technology coder? or a scripter? what if you code/script inside applications like FileMaker, Maya or Apple's own (AppleScript) Script Editor? Willow PE works wherever you are and whatever you're doing on your Mac (with the exception of typing into a password field - sorry).
Just take a minute to think about what you can do with just the Python snippet type. You can access your selection (or clipboard) as a python variable, provide user editable variables (with defaults), chain snippets together, and reapply your previous snippet over and over again on new selections. It really doesn't take much imagination to see how much time you'll save with this snippet type alone, but you also get CommandLine (think awk, sed, grep, perl, ruby, etc) and AppleScript snippets along with the less interesting (for you guys anyway) Text and ConfiguredText snippet types.
Laziness really is a virtue, do it once in Willow and give your Mac a good kick up the arse - it works for you now.
Complain about the use of the word "arse" here.
