It might be a threat to your/our way of life, but I'm not convinced it's a thread overall.<p>You can't write a program for your TV or Wristwatch, microwave or land line phone, LCD screen menu system or DVD player.<p>People can't do surgery without planning years in advance and studying for years in specialised schools, and this has been the case for hundreds of years, yet children still grow up to be doctors and surgeons; and all sorts of other professions which don't have free-home-tinkering-kits available.<p>If "everybody" wants an iPad and "nobody" cares that they can't program on it, then we're the minority in a tyranny of the majority situation and the only way out is having enough money to pay a company to design your own alternative.<p>It feels like something is really being lost - a lot of humans world wide growing up as content consumers, not realising that if they could shape the right forms, they could do the same kinds of magic themselves - equals not subservients[1].<p>But is anything really being lost? If you were a kid today would your nightly alarm clock program have the same charms when run up against your mobile phone's built in alarm? Maybe it's time for software development to grow up and realise the days you could build a spreadsheet in your home are gone with the days you could make cough syrup from home, and the industry needs to become a more professional, 'trained adults only' kind of industry.<p>In the early days of machine code, software was the electric circuits that rich eccentric people built in their labs. Basic was the valve radio circuits that Feynman puzzled over as a kid. C was the 555 timers and 74xx logic gates.<p>We were hoping that software would be a new kind of material to work with altogether, each iteration building on the previous work so that as it gets more powerful it still presents a small surface area, stays easy for beginners, kids, curious people to put modules together.<p>Instead, modern software is the integrated circuits that need years of training to use. It didn't become drag-and-drop coding, it became<p><i>NSDocument printDocumentWithSettings:showPrintPanel:delegate:didPrintSelector:contextInfo:</i><p>Instead of an OLPC which is both hackable device and the result of hacking at itself, we get iPad - you hack on your specialist hackstation (Mac/PC/...) and view in the iPad browser. Like you make 3D renderings in Blender and view them in a picture viewer, or a nationwide phone exchange which ends in a handset with a pad of numbers, like you design paint in a large chemistry lab and it ends up in a small pot with a brush.<p>Like many other industries.<p>[1] I twigged the other day that this is a major difference between me and a hobbyist friend of mine. He treats things with interest as if he is an equal and has every right to learn about them, willing to dive into a subject and believe he can get results. I treat things as nuanced and designed by experts, full of details to be cautious of and traps for the beginner, something to worry about and avoid. I like his style.