I define it as a casual user of my libraries. Designers are the best example: they're usually hooked into the development world and would be interested in a clever command line tool, but they normally don't have an entire build chain under their belt.
Re:OS X Isn't for Developers
by bobwaycott on Friday March 11, 2011 @01:29AM
(#2312387)
In my neck of the woods, a designer's tool chain rarely extends to anything outside Adobe tools. That's what developers are for ;)
I'm a designer, and a "user" of software, and I use several terminal commands on a regular basis. I don't consider myself anything approaching a "developer," but I code a little in Ruby, Javascript, etc. It's semantics, sure, but when you draw hard lines around what people are and what they "need," you potentially limit a lot of blurrier, less-stereotypical scenarios. And how is a designer (or a child, or a business-person, or a manager, or whoever) supposed to cross that mystical threshold into beginner developer if the tools are behind a financial or obfuscatory barrier?
I think that's the main argument. Getting started with command-line tools and developer-type stuff should be as easy as possible, so that people can try new things and break stereotypes and do more than they thought they could do.
A casual developer might be a different class of user ... but anyone who hits the point of writing code & installing libraries instead of applications has adequately stepped outside the role of user.
And even granting that, it is still not a firm enough basis on which to argue such an inflammatory statement as "OS X is not for developers"--when the casual developer is far better served by OS X's included toolchain than s/he is going to find in a default installation of Windows/Linux counterparts.
OS X is not "for" developers when it begins removing the tools that create the lowest barrier to entry for casual development I've seen in a default OS installation in the last 10 years (except maybe Gentoo Linux, one of the most "for developers" systems I've had the pleasure of using).