Sometimes I wish I had access to these resources 15 years ago when I was just a little kid and was wondering what a function was and why we want to have them. Yup, I started with Fortran and spaghetti code ;)
I have the same feeling, but it's not just code that are "easy" to learn now. I think that things like stanford engineering everywhere, MIT open course and Peter Norving's AI-Class will have a big impact in learning in general.