Ask HN: How do you explain how programming works to complete non-techies?

I didn't realize just how hard this was until my company had an offsite yesterday where they let the sales people and the engineers play together. I guess I normally hang out with people who have at least been forced to do Java or Matlab programming or something in college, but a lot of paradigms I thought of as common knowledge aren't.

The best example we came up with (for explaining how a large web site works) was an Excel spreadsheet analogy. Imagine a spreadsheet that has a bunch of graphs constructed from the data. The spreadsheet is our database of all of our data, and each graph is a different web page view.

Programming is pretty interesting, and I think non-programmers would really enjoy knowing what's going on. Too often though, I think explanations go right over their heads, and they've learned to not even bother asking.