Speaking for myself, the command line prompt never inspired me to learn programming. I messed with quite a few Commadore and even Sinclair computers back in the

Speaking for myself, the command line prompt never inspired me to learn programming. I messed with quite a few Commadore and even Sinclair computers back in the day and the command line was only ever used to load programs from disk. I did try programming from scratch and even typed in some of the programs published in BYTE and whatnot. Nothing I ever came up with on my own ever seemed worth the effort and certainly wasn’t how I wanted to use my time. What a pain in the ass. Typing all that crap and debugging was never as interesting as using programs. The vast majority of people have no interest in messing with programming. Most people have no internet in making anything. You can complain that it’s a symptom of consumer culture or whatever but I think it has always been the case that more people want to use a tool than make a tool. Even back in the 80s computers were bought to use programs primarily. Only a tiny minority were interested in programming and that will always be the case.