If I want to play the violin, there are violins designed specifically for letting me play them with little restraint. There are books designed specifically to guide me through learning how to play. Most people would hire an instructor to teach me the basics.<p>That's all possible with a closed system. You can make environments specially designed to encourage tinkering, rather than leaving everything open for intrusion. You can write guides teaching people things that they wouldn't normally see on a closed system. It doesn't exist by default like it does perhaps on a system wherein everything is viewable, but you can still create it. So it won't kill programming.<p>It's not like Apple's declaring a holocaust on all other computers. If you're so obsessed with tinkering that you think it's worth fucking around instead of learning to tinker in more meaningful ways — though I must admit that from my biased point of view that always seems like the college graduate whose poetry reads like high school — the other systems are all available, and will be for a long, long time; it won't be long before somebody releases an open source equivalent of the iPad for stupid people to go around claiming is objectively better in every way and for ordinary tinkerers to buy and tinker with.<p>But I'd like to address this troll accusation, because I find it unbecoming. I am not a troll. I have been a productive and contributing member of this community for nearly two years; even though my respect for it has constantly declined, I come in here to debate with people all the time. I don't do it to fuck around with your head or to provoke people. I do it because I enjoy stating my point of view, which is frequently very different from the mass opinions here.<p>My blog is not written for Hacker News. My blog is written for the potpourri audience of artists and literati and young adults that enjoy long essays written about random subjects. It's not a coding blog, so even when I write about subjects that interest people here I'm not writing it in a way that'll appeal to readers here. This article was submitted three times; the first time I asked that it be killed and the submitter graciously killed it for me. This is not of a tone appropriate for Hacker News.<p>But that does not make it a troll post. I wrote a post last month describing fictional Listerine commercials. I'm sure if it had been submitted here people would have been boneheaded to announce the commercials were fake and I was trolling. There are smart people here, but there are not very diverse people.