[kbenson]

With the prevalence of office jobs that use computers, being a developer is sort of like being an engineer in the 1960's or before but having the ability to whip up designs for simple mechanical devices that you can build for very low time and money cost, and replicate for free. It's like being the inventor of the slap-chop except that it costs so little to get items out there, that people often just do it for free. I would love it if I was doing some annoying repetitive task like mincing garlic or onions and someone said "hey, I can make that easier. Give me an hour..."

[lioeters]

I like your description, it's one of things I love about software, how malleable it is for quickly building "devices", tools for my own use or a potentially large number of users.

About the last point you made, how it would be great if hardware/mechanical devices could be made more like software - a few years ago I heard about "micro factories" (forgot the exact term): 3D printers for small(er) scale manufacturing. It seemed promising that soon we could be writing software to manufacture devices/products at home, in a garage, local maker "lab". If you thought of an easier mechanism to mince garlic, you could whip up a prototype in a code editor and "print out" a working prototype (or production-level device)..