> I'm not so excited about this... this might be the first step in locking down the platform.
Of course you're not excited about this. You're a brilliant nerd who founded a startup that invented a new programming language. This isn't for you. Or for me.
Getting to be Nerd Jesus every time a computer runs into trouble is gratifying. We get to be important. We get to trick out our gear to do all kinds of goofy, custom stuff. We get to build things that are neat.
Serving our needs is certainly important. It's important, also, to understand that we are the minority. Everyone else just wants a tool that works. The majority of human beings on earth find computers to be mystifying, frustrating, even scary things. Absent Nerd Jesus, the computer just seems to have a mind of its own. It has its own agenda and interacting with it is an exercise in guesswork and black magic.
What the iPad, and the iPhone before it, has taught us is simple: people want a computer they understand. They want technology, but optimizing for Nerd Jesus has given them shit technology that doesn't respect them, so they're used to being defensive around it.
This is all a long way of saying that I agree with you – this could be a first step in "locking down the platform" for you and me. And streamlining it so it's actually useful for everyone else who doesn't fetishize the Terminal, kernel extensions or compilers.
I think there will always be a place for Nerd Jesus to do his thing. But instead of being the focus of the market, we're finally going to focus on the vast majority of what most people actually care about doing.
We'll see what it costs us from a nerd perspective. I suspect it's less than we think – aside from the high of our indispensability as troubleshooters, of course.