On one hand it's much easier to find answers to things and/or solve problems thanks to Google and all the programming forums, Wikipedia, etc, etc... Back when I was learning (with no internet connection!), you'd often have only the skantest of information to work with and even have to resort to now unthinkable things like dissembling bits OS to get answers as to how stuff worked... Not to mention the endless hours of scratching your head and twiddling your code to try and solve one of those random compiler errors (oh the joy of porting something with C++ templates in it!) which you can now just Google for and find an answer to instantly.

On the other hand, when I first got interested in programming the Spectrum's user manual (!) had about 65% of it dedicated to BASIC programming with lots of little examples and a full listing of every BASIC command in it! How much harder it must be now for those people who haven't worked their way through the years like we have? It seems like in this aspect the entry level bar has risen significantly.

Thoughts?

Juk

Hehe, well no replies yet

Just to put the differences in perspective, I remember about 10 years ago my younger brother wanting to learn to program so somebody in our family bought him this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Game-Program.../dp/B00005TPJC

A few weeks later he was telling me he much it sucked and when I looked it was pretty surprising what it contained: Visual Studio C++ (Education Edition), a paperback book with transcripts of interviews with game developers, and some kind of 3D modelling package (no book or info on learning C++ though IIRC).

Juk

Definitely easier than it was 20 years ago when I started when there were no free tools and no internet (web), so if you had a problem you had to hope a co-worker could help or take a trip to the bookstore. There was Compuserve but there was not a lot of content.

Web programming has certainly gotten a lot more sophisticated now due to the web maturing a lot. I would say it's actually gotten harder depending on what you want to achieve.

It's of course a lot more accessible and resource rich now.

for desktop windows apps, windows forms in .net was insanely easy. Now WPF works much less intuitively so it is closer to MFC in difficulty which is a frustrating step backwards. It is, of course, much more powerful than mfc so at least we have that going for us

Well.

I for one think that it was more difficult back in the days.
Since most of the languages were low level and very complex.

As well you learned important knowledge such as pointers, allocating/deallocating memory, overflows, nulling variables and such.

Now look at the books: Sams Teach Yourself C# in 24 Hours

Okay, we all know it really doesn't take 24 hours but with such languages there are no need to null variables.

Now it is right into the game, page one.

Rock

+1. Definitely easier now than it used to be. Look at Python! I love Python, but it completely invalidates the need to learn things like pointers or linked lists. Our intro to programming course here at University used to be based in C, then to Java. Now we're using Python, and the students are writing more powerful programs but have no idea how the data structures are set up. It's fine, but it's a really different take on things.

I've also talked to grad students here who had never seen a line of assembler and who had never looked at the raw bytes of a file. Opening up a hex editor was like showing them they were plugged into the Matrix.

I think it became way harder to become good nowadays, but obviously way easier to do the first steps.

Resources like stackoverflow makes the good old newsgroups look like pretty bloated, elitist jerk circles with cut and dried opinions and no momentum. But you'll find gems in there that never make their way on google indexed pages. Not every group is mirrored.

Also, especially when it comes to web stuff, things like wordpress and in a way also drupal give everyone the chance to make a "website" without even knowing why a body is formed in HTML.
They then call it "web development" ... wtf? If there's no (web)application - there's no development, imho.

As you had to work very hard to even gather the resources in earlier days, that also meant you really had to understand what you were doing. Learning to code basically consisted of trial&error.
There was no way you could get answers to your questions within a couple of hours so you had to work on it until it works. And if, it was usually "RTFM" or "press F1" and it was rude, but not bad advice.

Today, users ask for help on how to create a wordpress blog on forums, instead of reading the 1000 word help document that explains everything.

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."

I honestly have no idea how you could ever learn, yet even become good in what you're doing without a shelf full of color coordinated by animal species sorted Oreilly books collection. I love their 1400 pages books series called "in a nutshell" or a 900 page "introduction to ...".

The Python example is brilliant.
Pointers in C++ most definitely are directly related to a lot of suicides, but going trough the .dll-hell either killed you or made you stronger, so to say.

To stand out of the masses of grad students who can't translate between dec, hex, bin and oct must be unbelievably hard these days while back in the days you were treated like a guru when you knew about css when everyone was making tables.

I think your brother was simply the recipient of a poor introduction to programming. Anything tailored to teach you "game programming" from the start is probably doomed to fail, as its target audience is probably impatient and wants to make games now and only views programming as a means to that end; you need to learn C (although I guess these days you can probably do it with any .NET language), then learn how to make games with the toolset you've acquired.

There are definitely lots of good books out there for almost anything you want to learn. In college I felt like learning C# and found a great book which also included a basic introduction to lots of CLR topics like working with SQL databases that I later found helpful when learning ASP.NET (found a great book from Microsoft Press for that).

Because of the wealth of information available to anyone who wants to get started these days, I would say it's easier now. Not that it was, like, the Dark Ages when I was learning myself all of 10-12 years ago or anything, but the Internet makes everything so much easier.

I'm not sure it is fine. I read a good article awhile back called The Perils of JavaSchools:

When I got my CS degree, most courses (including all introductory courses) were taught in Java with some higher division courses taught in C. I think my school recognized some of the concerns brought up in that article cause when I graduated they had just reverted to teaching Comp Sci 101 in C, specifically to expose people to pointers and stuff, before switching to Java for 102/103.

Yeah it was just a bad collection of stuff put together by somebody who had no appreciation of what it was like to learn programming.

Juk

MUCH MUCH easier! Just look at how many script languages are out there!

Even if you're a non programmer, you can still write some easy scripts or whatever you'd like - in AHK or else.

The problem with having it so easy is that people tend to skip fundamentals, and yes, they can write easy scripts, but when they extend them, it all goes to hell


Best,
John

Some things are vastly easier to do now.

However getting the most out of today's hardware gets increasingly harder as we're required to make better use of parallel processing, which can be very tricky to do right.

Learning how to program is much easier than it ever was

However, becoming a good programmer is, and always will be, hard. We can "old man shakes fist at cloud" about these damn kids who get to learn programming with Google, SO and Java all through college, but really, most of them will either learn how to do their job well, or quit. There always has been, and always will be, terrible developers writing terrible code for money. The specific tools they learned to program with are irrelevant, imo.

From a purely economic perspective it is much easier now than it has ever been. It hasn't been that long since any computer cost less than a grand or two. Good IDE's used to cost a ton of money as well as any kind of books on the subject.

Easier than 30 years ago, when it was exclusively for supernerds, but harder than 5-10 years ago. Loads and loads of resources available, but, much like poker, the bar for achieving anything worthwhile has been set fairly high. Things that were 'neat' and 'impressive' 5 years ago can be achieved today by near-illiterates using automated/prepackaged software.

This. There are a lot of programmers and a lot of them are not good. In fact, the fact that resources are much more available probably means that there are more bad programmers out there now.

^this

the cost barrier is practically removed now. when I came out of school, Linux was just starting so it wasn't as mainstream, Win32 programming was difficult and you had to have a MSDN membership which cost a bundle. Having internet access was a luxury and even with it, you had to rely on Usenet instead of just opening Google and typing in your question. But most of us relied on manuals.

if you mean just programming, easier.

If you mean being a pro software developer, much harder, especially for web. Where it used to be a solid pro background in microsoft, say, you'd need vbscript for ASP, some html, css and javascript and reasonable sql/stored procedure/database skills, now you'd need a decent professional to have:

1) solid .net (probably c-sharp)
2) javascript, jquery, and an understanding of properly integrating it into .net using scriptmanager or similar
3) understanding of test-driven development, that often means understanding MVC or MVP or more generally patterns (you don't need to build from scratch using these a lot of the time, but you need to pick this up from architects) and skills in something like NUnit
4) a basic understanding of metrics (eg cyclomatic complexity, coverage etc)
5) Either solid stored procedures and/or LINQ to SQL and/or entity framework and/or OO
6) database skills


Windows ain't much easier, especially if you want to do test-driven dev. Even without this, it's still getting it on with WPF/WCF/WF/patterns etc etc

This is just the tip of it. The rate of change/turnover of what's bleeding-edge->mainstream->redundant is insane, but good if you're someone who always likes learning new stuff.

Much harder now. 25 years ago, a typical programming assignment was take a flat file and add up all the numbers in column 3 and print it out. You have two weeks to begin testing cycles.

Now, take a web page, put a link on it to transfer all the information to another module and then I want to push a highlighted button and do all my tax forms if all the information is correct (and add a check box that if clicked will automatically make coffee). Yeah, right. I'll get right on it.

Easier, no question about it.

You can be a pretty terrible programmer nowdays and still look OK because the hardware is so much better. Documentation so much easier to find. Free source examples everywhere. Open source projects make it easier for novices to get a foot in the door. Just a few reasons....

Grunching, but easier IMO and it's not close. My first IDE/language was VB4.0 and I never used it though I browsed TeenProgrammingUnited (TPU) forever.

Now there are so many tutorials and all apps are web-based so you have tons of open source code to look at and get inspiration from. Man it's great.

Excellent point that cannot be overestimated.

Agreed with the "easier" sentiment due to more available information. It's also a lot easier to focus just on one thing and when you're good at it switch to something else these days.

Oftentimes you just have to find a good library/framework and understand it instead of becoming a true domain expert in that area.

I have no idea which one to quote, but this one works just fine.

First off, this is probably far more detrimental to learning than it is useful. The reality is that I can open up any web-page, press ctrl-s and find "inspiring codes."

The issue with all the free stuff on the internet is that the knowledge ceiling is very low. I began programming about one year ago, took a few months off for personal reasons, and now I am learning it again.

It was very "easy" at first, but there was a small problem: the knowledge ceiling I alluded to made me feel like I was much better at this stuff than I actually was. I managed to learn everything out there on HTML, JavaScript, CSS, AJAX, etc etc etc, in a few months. After sucking all the knowledge I could out of the web, I opened up some random page sources and alas, I couldn't make sense of a single word of what I was reading. This is not good.

Great, now I am stuck with a half-assed education (that I got for free, but I will get to this one in a second as well) that amounted to aprox. what I paid for it.

Yes, O'Reilly has those books already discussed, and no doubt, there is no way I learned even a tenth of what was in those things, and even more so, there is absolutely no way even a portion of that is available on the web (I would know, since I learned what I can).

So, for those who are getting an education. Sadly, since I am a joke of a programmer, I also have some friends who are in college and they come to me for advice on how to write codes and what to use for this or that. I posed a basic problem to a friend, and even after he "learned" html, he couldn't answer the question. It was about how to use entities, perhaps all that gobbly-**** found on blogs is not convincing enough evidence to certain schools that these things should still be learned, but I digress.

I have another friend who is in school and, you guessed, it, he has a web programming book from 2001! How did this one happen? I kindly told him to be sure to close all his tags, even though he may not be required to, you know, because this is good programming.

And even so, with so many website out there, I managed to find a few websites by new programmers who "just finished college," and their websites are a) poorly designed and b) poorly coded.

So the issue isn't so much the ease of getting in, but the quality of the information that is available and disseminated. I am under the impression that the education bar has been dropped considerably, but this is understandable since schools, which one time had to teach only C, BASIC, and Paskal, are now forced to teach Java, C, C#, C++, Obj-C, HTML, javascript, jquery, SQL, and the list goes on for ages.

For someone like me, the problem is furthered because there are so many resources, and frankly, it is confusing as hell to navigate all of it. Many of the programming books I have browsed offer null code, bad code, improper code formats, or codes that were good in 2003 but not today. Somehow, as someone who is not familiar with programming as I want to be, I have to find the good from the bad without knowing the good from the bad.

So, after learning so much, I found that I am once again back at square one, and I think I'll find myself back to square one again in the near future. Something is bound to come along and confound me so much that I decide I should just learn from scratch again.

You learn by building stuff.