I can’t help but picture the 15-year-old — or 45-year-old — who’s never programmed before, and who reads a little bit about Ruby on some website and is intrigued and wants to try learning it.

Maybe they have a thing they want to do, or maybe they’ve always just been curious about programming and this seemed like a nice way to start.

Are we going to ask that person to figure out how to install Ruby? If there are one-click installers out there, are we going to ask them to figure out which one is actually reputable and safe?

Curiosity like this is one of the ways new developers are made. I worry that the less the Mac is tinkerable out-of-the-box, the fewer developers we’ll get.

Or: we’ll only get certain kinds of developers — the ones of the right age and background who can go get a CS degree.