I think it's the opposite: our expectations have RISEN to an extent that it's harder for beginners to get started.
One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.
In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.
I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: <https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).
To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.
To be sure, the barrier to entry on professional level development is higher, but we also have chip-8, python, arduino, and other languages and systems that are arguably much more approachable than BASIC with a line only editor.
Many commenters have pointed out that it was always a tiny fraction of people that could do this kind of thing, and I think that’s probably true, in retrospect. My ideas about the subject are probably colored by the fact that it always seemed easy to me, and I assumed (at the time) that others would also find it easy because I hadn’t come to grips with the bell curve yet. But if I think critically, there was basically no one I knew that was doing anything more ambitious than typing in games from magazines at that time…. So perhaps my worries about the dumbing down of society are overblown?
After all, it’s not like no one is graduating high school or something.
One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.
In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.
I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: <https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).
To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.