Argh, I promised myself I wouldn't come back to this thread actually; debates around this particular subject I've been part of have been tiresome =)

I can assure you that I'm not conflating simple things like user experience vs developer experience. That was the point of the asterisk.

I'm also very positive that the creator of Hypercard and Excel do _not_ think of their creation as appliance.

The whole point of the discussion around computer and computer languages/systems as tool for thought, is presuming that computing can be another form of mass literacy. Let's also not get into whether this should be the case (and my opinion here is less naive that one might think); I'm just saying that this is the debate. At the risk of exaggerating and drawing an imperfect parallel, the medieval monks also considered human language literacy as a "developer" thing, e.g. "reading the Bible is a separate domain to the everyday life of a consumer". And yes, they did make beautiful books as products/appliances. Again, I'm not saying programming languages will ever be useful to learn for the masses; that's another topic of discussion.

I agree very much that there is no general solution, and that tinkerers gotta tinker. Though this is orthogonal to the discussion (FYI I absolutely despise language tinkering/golfing these days; that's why I made sure to talk about this topic without talking about Mu earlier).