you are absolutely right. just focusing on creating uber-techies won't get us very far. what i have in mind with educating the general public is more in a broad

you are absolutely right. just focusing on creating uber-techies won't get us very far. what i have in mind with educating the general public is more in a broader sense, to create an understanding and awareness of the challenges of technology, to give people the capacity to make value judgements and be able to evaluate which technology to trust. malleable systems appears to approach this from the other side by pushing for technology that can be trusted because it is easier to adapt by anyone to their own needs (and therefore easier to understand) even as a developer i want that. i have only recently realized how much of a barrier elaborate toolchains used to build software are to the maintenance and adaptability for my own needs. subconsciously i have always preferred building software without a toolchain, but this realization has helped me to make that preference explicit. any application i build now must be able to run directly from a source repo without any installation step. to be able to make changes at worst a restart should be necessary, but preferably not even that. using languages and development environments like smalltalk, lisp and pike i can build applications that can be changed at runtime, which greatly increases the malleability at least for those who are able to learn some programming.