>Anyone can learn to read, and write, computer code
I agree that most motivated learners could pick up some very basic software skills, and those would be beneficial to them. In a utopian world basic programming skills would be treated the same as basic literacy and numeracy. However, at this point in time, it seems to me that most users don't care (maybe because they don't know what they're missing). As an analogy, most people could learn basic knife skills in a couple of hours and be much more productive in the kitchen with a chef's knife than they are now with the huge array of inferior point tools (cheap dull knives, garlic slicer, chopper, egg slicer, etc.). However there is obviously a big market for the latter. Similarly, I'm not sure extensible and modifiable systems have enough attraction to the average user.
Another reason for closed systems, one which I think is more important than the profit motive, is that designing extensible and modifiable systems is really hard and comes with trade-offs. E.g. Squeak (a Smalltalk dialect) allows you to inspect and modify almost everything in the system while it runs, but that also means that is really easy to screw up the system behind repair (e.g. you can switch every boolean in the running system by evaluating 'true become: false') and that supporting users of such systems becomes much harder. I am not aware of any system that has a solution to this.
I agree that most motivated learners could pick up some very basic software skills, and those would be beneficial to them. In a utopian world basic programming skills would be treated the same as basic literacy and numeracy. However, at this point in time, it seems to me that most users don't care (maybe because they don't know what they're missing). As an analogy, most people could learn basic knife skills in a couple of hours and be much more productive in the kitchen with a chef's knife than they are now with the huge array of inferior point tools (cheap dull knives, garlic slicer, chopper, egg slicer, etc.). However there is obviously a big market for the latter. Similarly, I'm not sure extensible and modifiable systems have enough attraction to the average user.
Another reason for closed systems, one which I think is more important than the profit motive, is that designing extensible and modifiable systems is really hard and comes with trade-offs. E.g. Squeak (a Smalltalk dialect) allows you to inspect and modify almost everything in the system while it runs, but that also means that is really easy to screw up the system behind repair (e.g. you can switch every boolean in the running system by evaluating 'true become: false') and that supporting users of such systems becomes much harder. I am not aware of any system that has a solution to this.