[yzmtf2008]

I think the idea is that we should cater to intuition, and give everyone the necessary tools to understand and tweak it, but it's not necessary to do good. To the average people, appreciating the bus brings much less utility than being able to take the bus. Should we not have the bus just because people can't appreciate the combustion engine?

But then, of course, intuition is more useful for some people. For those people, no one is stopping you from digging into the engine itself. This is really the price discrimination idea applied to utility: offering a cheaper, easier to use interface (taking the bus) means now the bus is useful not only to the engineers, but the passengers as well.

The situation about computing is not really that much different. If you want to learn the internal of computers, Gentoo exists, feel free to use it. But should everyone use Gentoo? Not really. I'm probably more proficient in Linux than the average developer, but I don't see the need of using Gentoo myself either.

That is not to say we can't do better either. The signature design for SQLAlchemy is leaking abstractions (but in a good way). The average dashboard for a car today is way more complicated than the dashboard of a car 70 years ago. Yet, that's not stopping car ownership to grow. Maybe there's a lesson for us somewhere there as well.