The problem is most of the people writing code in Access (or monstrous Excel macros or in apps like MatLab etc) are not trained programmers. I think the article sums it up well by using "power user" to describe them - technical people with no formal programming training. Think Engineers (the non software kind), Accountants, Plant Technicians these kinds of people.
In my org (I'm an Engineer at a manufacturing plant) a long time ago someone senior made the decision our company was not in business of hiring programmers so any coding is done by contractors.
So yes people have implemented things (Engineering models for example) in MatLab, or Access, or as an Excel spreadsheet etc as "prototypes" ostensibly intended to be rewritten by a real programmer. At some point these models invariably find their way into production environment and suddenly you have some kind of mission critical thing written in Access (or VB6 or Matlab or Excel).
Then IT has minor panic a contractor is given the job of trying to translate the "prototype" into "real" code and has a battle on their hands.
Often programming contractor doesn't have technical understanding of what model is doing, regardless of choice of language the code engineers write tends to look like Fortran (i.e it's essentially all math formulas), even comments probably don't help when they say stuff like "/* Ergun's formula to calc Delta P */" that doesn't mean a lot to someone without a chem eng background. I've seen contractors produce bugs by doing things like misreading a spec and adding a variable called Fe203 (i.e Fe "two hundred and three) instead of Fe2O3 (Fe "Two Oh three" - a chemical formula). You can't really blame contractor he doesn't know anything about chemistry - he was just hired to rewrite this monster in java based on a spec.
So I don't think its a simple as turning problem over to an experienced programmer and expecting success.
In my org (I'm an Engineer at a manufacturing plant) a long time ago someone senior made the decision our company was not in business of hiring programmers so any coding is done by contractors.
So yes people have implemented things (Engineering models for example) in MatLab, or Access, or as an Excel spreadsheet etc as "prototypes" ostensibly intended to be rewritten by a real programmer. At some point these models invariably find their way into production environment and suddenly you have some kind of mission critical thing written in Access (or VB6 or Matlab or Excel).
Then IT has minor panic a contractor is given the job of trying to translate the "prototype" into "real" code and has a battle on their hands.
Often programming contractor doesn't have technical understanding of what model is doing, regardless of choice of language the code engineers write tends to look like Fortran (i.e it's essentially all math formulas), even comments probably don't help when they say stuff like "/* Ergun's formula to calc Delta P */" that doesn't mean a lot to someone without a chem eng background. I've seen contractors produce bugs by doing things like misreading a spec and adding a variable called Fe203 (i.e Fe "two hundred and three) instead of Fe2O3 (Fe "Two Oh three" - a chemical formula). You can't really blame contractor he doesn't know anything about chemistry - he was just hired to rewrite this monster in java based on a spec.
So I don't think its a simple as turning problem over to an experienced programmer and expecting success.