[mkramlich]

I love the meme I'm seeing lately in some of the articles like this, that "it's only been recently that it's been possible to teach yourself to program". Having flashbacks to 1981, personally. I'm sure some of you other oldsters are having flashbacks to the 70's. Yes, Virginia, it has been possible for a few decades now to teach yourself how to code, how computers work, and to write real software that people will pay you for. This is not a new phenomenon or new capability.

[nhebb]

I think that should be qualified. Computers weren't as ubiquitous back in the 70's as they are now, nor was learning material. The TRS-80 with monitor was released in 1977 for ~$600 - about $2200 in today's dollars. I only knew of several kids with home systems.

When I took Computer Math (my high school's programming class), we had to learn programming on a piece of cardboard! It was the CARDIAC, Cardboard Illustrative Aid To Computation - http://www.simnia.com/it/cardiac/cardiac.htm.

After we became adept as manually running programs on the cardboard, we transitioned to dialing into a mainframe. Nothing says fun like dialing a rotary phone over and over until you finally made a connection. And of course, mainframe time was limited, so our BASIC and FORTRAN programs had to be written out by hand before hand. The CLI was an unforgiving beast and disconnections were frequent.

Could people teach themselves to program in the 70's? Sure, but there's really no comparison to the learning opportunities available today, and I don't think it's right to disparage anyone who blogs about their learning experiences.

[viscanti]

There's been an explosion in easy access to high quality learning material now. Sure, it's always been possible to teach yourself. Higher level languages and frameworks have sufficiently lowered the barrier to entry, that more people are willing to take the first steps. Being able to easily find answers on Google, to problems that might otherwise be sticking points, also makes it easier than ever to keep going once you've started learning/building. It's possible to learn to program without access to any of those, but it's certainly much easier now.