[gizmo]

The quantity of programmers has exploded. Programming was a lot harder and more frustrating before stackoverflow and other online resources. If you wanted to learn to program you had to struggle your way through. And those who did would end up being pretty decent programmers.

Nowadays there is no such filter. Anybody can get something to barely work by copy-pasting from stackoverflow. This isn’t a negative by itself, it just means that we now have many professional programmers who never had to try hard. And quality goes down as a result.

Code quality tends to be the worst in areas with very low barriers to entry (web stuff and such) and very high in domains where you need to be a good engineer in order to get anything done at all.

[pornel]

Before the Web there were various BASIC-like languages. I remember Amiga had AMOS environment which was like BASIC+SDL, and people produced completely amateurish games in it (and I know which ones, because when they crashed, they'd jump to AMOS' IDE).

I'll argue that StackOverflow has improved things a lot. Now you can search for your problem, or publish your code somewhere, and people will gladly tell you how wrong you are. Before that could be wrong and keep writing spaghetti code off-line while being blissfully unaware how horrible it is.

I'll also question whether low barriers to entry lower average skill. Low barriers to entry mean increased competition, which creates a pressure to differentiate yourself. OTOH with high barriers to entry, once you get in, you can stay complacent, because you're irreplaceable whether you improve or not.