Well with the adoption of shader technology in modern graphics, especially games, will the artists start scripting their own shaders, or will this be a programmer-specific domain still?
And if artists would like to learn shaders, do they have any preference on which shader language they will learn for? Currently there's the good ol' Pixar Renderman which is tried and tested, but probably will only be used for movies still. There's the new HLSL (High-Level Shading Language) that's going to be included with DirectX 9, then there's also the Shading language to be released with OpenGL 2.0. There's also Cg from NVIDIA, which is yet another alternative, together with the (many?) game specific shading languages, such as for Quake3, and possibly Doom3.
So my questions are will artists like to learn any shader languages, which one's they would like to learn, and when? If there's enough support for a particular Shading language I am interested in writing a tutorial or two for this site, including any particular techniques or effects that people would like to see.
I get the feeling that shaders will eventually be handled by artists with more intuitive ways than scripting, and there are steps made that make it seem that it's heading that way.. eg. from http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=IO_20021112_7023