[orclev]

Another fault with his logic is that programming languages are very specialized and very powerful tools. You could try to dumb them down to make them work for the average person (which has been done ad nauseum at this point) but then they would no longer be capable of solving certain classes of problem either simply or quickly.

To go back to the car analogy, yes most people understand at least at a rudimentary level how modern cars function, but most people also lack the tools to do anything but the most basic of maintenance on a modern car. Even assuming they had the tools available, they still wouldn't understand how to use them or even how to diagnose certain classes of fault. We could say that in order to allow everyone to perform maintenance on their cars at home that car manufacturers aren't allowed to use anything but standard tools to build their cars, but that would basically undo the last ~30 years of advances in the auto industry. Want to own a Tesla? Oh sorry, non-standard parts, going to need to pull that off the market. The situation in the programmer world is basically the same, yeah we could make everyone program in something like BASIC (and even that is probably too complicated for most people), but that's kind of like tieing one hand behind your back and then jumping in the deep end of the pool. Programming is hard enough as is, we don't need to start introducing handicaps.

[rtens]

I don't like the car analogy too much since a car is basically a tool while computers are a medium. I agree with you that programming languages on the other hand, definitely are tools.