I do a lot of freelance working with small companies / non-profits. The people there typically need what are programmatically simple tasks done: converting fields of a CSV to some other format, adjusting the appearance of only certain Excel sheets in a folder of files, etc. But they are not what today we call "programmers," and there are no good tools anymore for them to easily build things that accomplish these theoretically simple tasks.

What's worse, it's even more difficult for me to build them a solution. If these systems came with something as powerful as Hypercard was on Macs in the early 90s, I could make them something they could maintain themselves, and it would have a GUI and everything. Today I have to go through an enormous build process and all kinds of hoops just to wrap simple tasks in a usable UI. This is NOT personal computing!

I think one part of the issue is that an entire generation or two of personal computing users has now grown up with only this "consumer" mentality and they have no idea what they're missing, what was abandoned more or less in the 90s. It's a very frustrating and sad state of affairs — but also one primed for a change.

> I'm saddened by the fact that "modern" desktops are increasingly becoming consumption-only devices.

I have been lamenting the loss of the ability to code as soon as you switched on a computer, ever since I moved from a Commodore 64 to an IBM PC clone. :)

You can’t even use $500+ devices as a simple calculator without an “app.”

We need more stuff like Swift Playgrounds, preinstalled on operating systems, but would people care?

The first thing almost everyone wants to do is open a browser and log on Facebook etc.