>I vehemently disagree on this. Apple has made a silly fortune proving the contrary.
Totally orthogonal.
Apple cares about UI and attractive industrial design, and was the first companies to really get that in the computer space (and later in the MP3, smart phone, and tablet spaces). Good UI design is good for experts and novices alike. Do you really think that most people who used DOS computers once upon a time would really want to go back to 100% command-line interactions? (Yes, I know there are exceptions in the Unix crowd who swear that vi IS sliced bread and that anything not on the command line sucks...but there are probably 10x as many "expert" developers who swear by GUIs. Can't please everyone.)
The key difference is that, if you shy away from programming, there are huge categories of things you will never be able to do. And until you know how to program, you won't even know what those things are.
The "learning to read" analogy (elsewhere in this thread) is good. It's a powerful skill that, until you know it, you don't even know what it is you're missing.
Totally orthogonal.
Apple cares about UI and attractive industrial design, and was the first companies to really get that in the computer space (and later in the MP3, smart phone, and tablet spaces). Good UI design is good for experts and novices alike. Do you really think that most people who used DOS computers once upon a time would really want to go back to 100% command-line interactions? (Yes, I know there are exceptions in the Unix crowd who swear that vi IS sliced bread and that anything not on the command line sucks...but there are probably 10x as many "expert" developers who swear by GUIs. Can't please everyone.)
The key difference is that, if you shy away from programming, there are huge categories of things you will never be able to do. And until you know how to program, you won't even know what those things are.
The "learning to read" analogy (elsewhere in this thread) is good. It's a powerful skill that, until you know it, you don't even know what it is you're missing.