This trend towards simpler and simpler abstractions is everywhere.
We see it in the development world as well, with languages provide ever higher abstractions, and frameworks providing ever more opinionated approaches to solving things.
This happens not because of some war against writing ultra high performance code in assembly, but because developers don't want to deal with assembly on a daily basis.
My phone is a device that needs to just work. My desktop/laptop are devices that needs to let me do whatever I want them to.
Too often, people in our community conflate the two and conclude nefarious intent, when what we're seeing are market forces at work and the creation of products that the market demands.
This isn't to say that we should not be vigilant, but I agree with what you're saying here - these trends are not by themselves evidence of a war on general purpose computing.
> Too often, people in our community conflate the two and conclude nefarious intent, when what we're seeing are market forces at work and the creation of products that the market demands.
I find it hard to ascribe it all to "market forces" when it's also aided by legislation like the DMCA. Anyway if the EU Digital Markets act someday opens up App stores, we'll see _more_ market forces at play and can see exactly what consumers truly want.
These aren’t mutually exclusive though. There absolutely are forces that we should be worried about.
My point is that despite these concerns, there are completely natural and understandable reasons for many of the trends we’re seeing that are unrelated to those concerns and don’t necessarily imply progression towards an environment hostile to general purpose computing.
We see it in the development world as well, with languages provide ever higher abstractions, and frameworks providing ever more opinionated approaches to solving things.
This happens not because of some war against writing ultra high performance code in assembly, but because developers don't want to deal with assembly on a daily basis.
My phone is a device that needs to just work. My desktop/laptop are devices that needs to let me do whatever I want them to.
Too often, people in our community conflate the two and conclude nefarious intent, when what we're seeing are market forces at work and the creation of products that the market demands.
This isn't to say that we should not be vigilant, but I agree with what you're saying here - these trends are not by themselves evidence of a war on general purpose computing.