Computing doesn't lead well, in its current form, to the development of coevolutionary mastery. That's the thing, I suspect. For example: Your text editor, with

Computing doesn't lead well, in its current form, to the development of coevolutionary mastery. That's the thing, I suspect. For example: Your text editor, with the exception of emacs et al, probably isn't particularly programmable in a form that the average user is likely to discover. There's probably not a way to right click on a button and see what function it's calling, or to right click on a transformed bit of text and see what's been done to it. The program itself isn't built for that. And the economic interest in not building it for that is obvious - if you let users have access to the full power of the machine, even worse to share their modifications, what do they need you for any more? How are you going to convince people to buy version 15 when they've got version 14 set up the way they want it? Your options have become increasingly strongly contrasted: Become a programmer or live in user-land. As if a programmer isn't just a more knowledgeable class of user and as if that's not a spectrum. It's nothing special about typing white text into a black screen. Even if we still lived in command line land, I don't think that we'd be better off. I don't feel like it has anything to do with how hard the computer is to use - at least not at a surface level. It seems to me more to do with how programmable your programs are and how easily you can start doing useful things with that power.