I have been programming for 15+ years. It doesn't mean that I instantly know every application framework in existence. Especially the (looking back at it now) the pretty complex way the original Mac OS apps were written.
I think sp332's point is that if you have 15+ years programming and you can't get a guy to produce you what you exactly want, then you would eventually do a prototype by yourself to show them how to do it.
I am honestly bewildered by your thought process here.
If I am getting someone to build me an Android app and I don't know how to do it. Then I am not going to learn Java, SDK, tool chain, build process and buy a device just to show them how to do it. I am going to send them an email and tell them to change it and go back and forth until I am happy.
I don't think you got my point about the story. The pregrammer made an UI utility in few hours so Jobs could design the calculator the way he wanted. A prototype can be done in whatever you already know, so there is no need to learn anything outside your current skill set.
If you aren't able to produce that then probably your programming skills are not higher enough and hence you could say that you can't code (not that is a bad thing anyway)
I was thinking, since the drawing functionality was mostly right, Jobs could have tweaked the background color or shadow size manually instead of telling Espinosa to move things around a pixel at a time and waiting for another iteration.
This is absolutely ridiculous logic. He was doing far more important things at the time than prototyping a calculator, even if he could. These were likely 10 minute flash meetings where he gave direction. This was about time, and time alone.
Apparently for Jobs this was very important to him (he was very picky about details anyway), and if you sum all of his time wasted on each interaction I can see how they are equivalent, he just changed a few UI things anyway.
I get a very different message from that story. The Calculator Construction Kit struck me, the first time I read this, as the ur-program for HyperCard and (especially) Quartz Composer.
I think Steve took one look at it and said "yep, this is how you design a user interface". NeXT and Apple kept coming back to this idea.
