I think the drift many people have is that the essence of what a computer is, - exactly the only (up to trivial differences) machine that can be arbitrarily pro

I think the drift many people have is that the essence of what a computer is, - exactly the only (up to trivial differences) machine that can be arbitrarily programmed - is being obfuscated by devices that make it easy to consume and hard to produce, an asymmetry that doesn't need to exist. A few months ago I read on HN this analogy, which I found very apt: it's like there's no space in the modern computing world for a computer-literate "middle class". You're either not interested in computers at all and you're fine with a tablet or a chromebook, or you need to know so much stuff about computers that you might as well make a career out of it. Sent from my iPhone, how ironic.