Hi Krister,
enough by far to get around, partly because i have a terrible memory for syntax, so my question is do i really need to know about programming to be able to manage Drupal?
I don't have enough experience to comment on Drupal as a whole, but I've been able to get a long way without doing any hacking. Modules just seem to install themselves when you unpack and checkbox them, and new content types will chug along with the default views. If you add new fields to content types with the CCK then the module also brings in a default way of representing those fields on the page, so you'll only ever need to CSS it.
As an example, currently I'm marvelling at the ecommerce module, which seems to do a whole payment workflow without a single line of PHP being written by me. E-commerce generally is a huge, sprawling mess, and getting it right in other frameworks has typically involved a lot of hacking, but so far not with Drupal. Ask me again when I've had a fiddle with the WorldPay sub-module, and trying to send them custom fields, though!
The reason we've been doing a lot of programming is that, if we want to use Drupal for our clients rather than ourselves, then they're going to have quite exacting standards and we need to stretch Drupal to its limits as early as we can so we know what it can do.
Cheers, J-P