This is what computer programming means for me. You can build your own tools. You can share them with others. When you build and share such tools, you meet other people that perceive and interact with the world in the same way as you do. You make new friends. I guess this is what I've been trying to do in my life. Get people to understand this process. With computers, you can make your own tools, and so you can augment yourself, and others, to accomplish more things. This is something special about computer and especially open source tools. It costs no money at all to try this.

This idea isn't really new, either. Steve Jobs called the Macintosh "a bicycle for the mind", referring to the fact that the human on a bicycle is the most efficient animal on the planet. And before Jobs, you can see similar ideas in Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, where a whole section is about the human-computer interaction loop, and how their hardware (the mouse, the keyset, the realtime display) was designed to improve this loop and make the tool as transparent as possible (update: actually the segment I was thinking about is in a later talk from Douglas Engelbart in 1986). Just like when you ride a bicycle, and you're not particularly thinking about pedalling and braking and shifting gears and keeping your balance. It's as natural as walking.

But then, there is a limitation on that as soon as you're not the one building the tool. Say you buy a Macintosh or a Windows machine. Someone has designed it to work a certain way. And their design will shape how you perceive and interact with the world.