[rimantas]

  Not every potential user is an idiot.

Sure. He may be very smart person—just in the different area of expertise. For him computer is just a tool. Like not everyone wants to learn about shifting gears, tuning carburetor or operating the choke just to be able to get from point A to point B by a car, not everyone wants to learn hot to tweak a computer.

[asdflkj]

Here is why this common metaphor is wrong: the only useful thing cars do is get you from point A to point B. Mucking around with the innards is pointless unless you like doing it. Hacking a computer could be both fun and useful for a great variety of smart people. Furthermore, a car is a physical thing with rigid physical constraints on its design. If you want to tweak your car, you need to do a lot of stupid busywork with your wrench before you get to anything interesting. You need to have a wrench, and a garage for that matter. With an operating system, there are basically no constraints beyond the imagination of its makers.

[houseabsolute]

> If you want to tweak your car, you need to do a lot of stupid busywork with your wrench before you get to anything interesting.

Sounds plenty analogous to the many parts of the compiler or interpreter toolchains in place in modern OSes.

[bobbin]

> Hacking a computer could be both fun and useful for a great variety of smart people.

I don't understand. Could you give concrete examples of "hacking a computer" that could be fun and useful for a great variety of smart people?

[kiba]

Writing up a bot program to gather tons of statistical data so you can do your job as a marketeer thousand of times faster than your peers.

Crisscrossing traffic patterns with a database of customers so you can efficiently landscape all your clients and make more money instead of waiting around being stuck in traffic.

Build and program swarm bots that clean the floors of your client faster so you can jump to the next client.

Write A/B testing programs for your restaurant chains so you can increase earning from your customers by incrementally trying out ways to get more customers, sell more foods, etc.

Programming, however, only tended to be used by programmers.

[arethuza]

There is already a "programming" environment used by lots of non-developers: it's called Excel.