[zwnow]

I define golden age by how much I have to do to support my family. How much work there is and ultimately how much $/hr you are paid for it. Your interpretation is also very valid. The article complains about there not being available jobs though, so I went that route.

[ecb_penguin]

That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.

[surgical_fire]

If that's your metric, then the golden age never ended, and we are still in the upward trend.

There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants.

If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.

[freedomben]

That's true, but I think you need to account for the state of hardware and operating systems too. Unless you're on Linux, the hackability and control over your own computing environment has never been worse (aside from when those things weren't accessible at all). Yes I can build almost anything nowadays, but actually using it is a different story, even just for personal use (ask people with iPhones and increasingly Android about that).

[surgical_fire]

> Unless you're on Linux

Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?

I am forced to use a Mac at work, but I digress.

[freedomben]

> Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?

I totally agree, but most people I know (myself included) initially got started on different systems (Windows in my case). If I'd had to learn Linux at the same time, it may have been too steep a learning curve