My take on it is, the computer industry, because they're capitalists like any industry, care about money. The engineers working there often care about the users of course, but the shareholders don't give a damn. They just want money. Ultimately, that greed determines the output of the engineers far more effectively than the ideals of the engineers themselves. (This could be generalised to basically any public company, and any of their employees. Employment is an amazing crowd control tool.)
To sell stuff, promise of usefulness is more important than genuine usefulness. We only care about the substance insofar as it reinforces the appeal (fortunately, the stuff gotta be genuinely useful, or the scam would be exposed). The industry could explain how computers work, but that would be far less effective than selling selling a magic wand.
So we end up with computers that hide their internals, so the user doesn't have to deal with them. Language based interface (command line) is put aside for the point & click "caveman interface" (Bret Victor showed us some amazing GUI, but rarely ever saw this since sketchpad). And we pile up abstractions on top of abstractions without stopping for a minute to consider the sheer madness of the distributed cognitive load implied by a personal computing system that requires over 10.000 thick books to write.
Yes, all of the above. This wasn't so bad when our reach was less, but today with Siri-like things being built into Barbie dolls it seems we should be spending more time thinking deeply before we chase that dollar, eh?
(P.S. I'm a fan of your Earley Parser Explained post. Kudos, great job!)
To sell stuff, promise of usefulness is more important than genuine usefulness. We only care about the substance insofar as it reinforces the appeal (fortunately, the stuff gotta be genuinely useful, or the scam would be exposed). The industry could explain how computers work, but that would be far less effective than selling selling a magic wand.
So we end up with computers that hide their internals, so the user doesn't have to deal with them. Language based interface (command line) is put aside for the point & click "caveman interface" (Bret Victor showed us some amazing GUI, but rarely ever saw this since sketchpad). And we pile up abstractions on top of abstractions without stopping for a minute to consider the sheer madness of the distributed cognitive load implied by a personal computing system that requires over 10.000 thick books to write.