We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with HyperCard.
I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right way to use a computer to solve your problem is to track down and buy some piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the "buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self-sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and "programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off-the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your data and any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.
Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would they use a hypercard clone?
The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical.
But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.
Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how many people use them and to what extent.
To reiterate what ChuckMcM said at the top of this thread. The "hackers" who would figure that stuff out are still there still doing things no one expected could be done systems that no one thought would be used in those ways. We didn't actually lose anything. It's just a little obscured by the sea of consumers of computing who aren't hacking on those systems.
The filters that kept the consumer away from computing are mostly gone but that didn't make the consumer magically become interested in tinkering with those systems.
I'm not the person to do it, but I wish someone would design Flash2.0.
In that respect I think we've hit some kind of endgame for software as it's historically been done - the bells-and-whistles show - because smaller, more targeted software so often hits the mark better.
For example, when people ask how to get into playing piano, I steer them away from a MIDI controller and software and towards the cheap home portable hardware. The hardware has nearly ideal software for the task: it starts instantly, never crashes or glitches, never needs to update, can only be hacked with physical access, has ideal latency, and does not require additional plugs or configuration. Put in batteries and flip the switch and you can practice. And past the very most inexpensive ones, they all have the connectivity needed to control software.
And yet many technically inclined people - my previous self, friends, etc. - will hear that recommendation and still opt for that MIDI controller and get a gadget with more knobs and wheels, instead of a perfect learning tool, just because of the temptations of software that could "do anything." There's a shopper's high in it. But guess what the last software purchase I made was? An emulation of old home portable keyboard sounds(Plogue PortaFM). What goes around, comes around.
My boss had a time consuming task to do weekly. I looked at the steps, which were very basic and repetitive. It is the type of thing that a small program could easily handle. So I automated it. The problem is that most people see the tasks that they perform as a job that must be done. They may think about delegating it to other people, but they rarely think that it can be delegated to the machine. Which is ironic when the machine is involved in the process.
I suspect that there are many reasons why people don't think about writing a program. One reason is that software developers rarely make such possibilities clear to the end user. Another reason is that there is an aura of wizardry around programming. In a sense there is: programming languages rarely allow users to express a task in the terms process that they would use while performing it in an application. (Another irony, since the user is essentially telling the program what code to execute.)
And it certainly isn’t dead.
Or to put it another way, it's alive and kicking ass :-)
I feel this way. I've been at this a long time but all my non-work computing is either futzing about or incredibly low-value. Spreadsheets are pretty nice but I could do without them. Some kind of instant messaging or email is pretty useful. Calendar reminders are nice. But there are decent alternatives to all of them that aren't really that much worse, for personal use, while computers are expensive and take up a lot of time, especially to get good enough to use them without constantly being confused and mystified (see: any non-nerds using computers).
90%ish of what I get out of all this, personally, is media access, which could be almost perfectly replaced by living somewhat closer to a library and having a Netflix DVD subscription. I kinda think the everything-always-available aspect actually makes things worse, so a little extra friction or forcing choices might be an improvement. Ditto spending—I think any savings from online shopping is probably exceeded, for most people, by increased total spending.
It's looking increasingly likely I'll never start a significant side-project, let alone found a product of any significance whatsoever, because I just can't think of anything useful to do with these magical boxes that's not already being done. Since everyone says that business ideas are the easy part I guess I'm truly fucked because I can't even come up with one of those that survives a day of thought and research. I look at computers and the Internet and see a time-suck that is, most of the time, ill-applied, dangerous, and probably harming productivity in most areas.
[EDIT] to support the "expensive" thing, say it's about $2000 every four years per person to keep in smartphones and larger computing devices that don't take up too much space (laptop or tablet), that work well enough to actually be semi-useful rather than just a constant pain in your ass, and that will actually probably last and remain usable for four years, on average. Two adults in a household, that's about $1,000/yr in hardware, no tinkering, no gaming consoles, no bling'd out new phone every year, no peripherals, just to basically get the "job" done. Two streaming services of some kind, call it $20/mo, and that's a pretty low count. Good home Internet plus the Internet portion of your cell phone bill, for me, that's about $110/mo combined for the two of us (kids don't have their own stuff yet, and hell, may not at all until they can pay for it, because this stuff's expensive). That totals to about $2500/yr. You can buy a hell of a lot of physical media, (physical) games, postage stamps, puzzle books, whatever, for $2500/yr, and if you don't just throw it away you can keep using all that stuff the next year, and the one after, without paying again.
In fact, if you consider that someone else aims to "solve" these media access problems as a thing you can learn from and tweak (perhaps adding some value, or shortening the delivery chain for someone else), then perhaps you can be freed up from having to feel like you have to do everything yourself.
One of the hardest things to learn to do well is to create and run a business, and in my experience it takes more hard work than good ideas to be successful.
10 PRINT HELLO
20 GOTO 10
Aside from futzing around with C++, x86 assembler (never could find a book for C64, so never got to learn it on 6510), there were the same "rules" then as now. The builders build, and most just futz around, play and watch some movies.
It will take time. Dedicated effort. Sweats, pain and troubleshooting. There's never been a better time than now. No need to lay the foundation, one can start right off the bat. The trick is that it has to be fun, involving and based on true motivation (hunger).
https://store.unity.com/#plans-individual
I'm leaning on the conclusion that nothing fundamentally really changed.
10 GOTO 20
20 GOTO 10
I quite enjoyed but was baffled at the time that this caused the loading screen behaviour to kick in.