[jordan_litko]

To me the biggest difference between now and then is that the quality of instruction is probably much better now. Not only is the quality better but the number of options is also much higher. Between resources like teamtreehouse, code school, codecademy, youtube and the thousands of pages you can find with google -- people who want to learn to code today have a marked advantage over those who wanted to learn in 1996.

In the end it always comes down to a persons will to succeed. Learning programming is basically a battle to simply keep putting your face in front of the code. The biggest value that resources like teamtreehouse and codecademy offer is that they make it more engaging (read: less painful) and so people are more likely to press on and get to a point where they say "Hey, maybe I can actually be a programmer".

[chavesn]

> people who want to learn to code today have a marked advantage over those who wanted to learn in 1996.

True, but they aren't competing against job candidates from 1996.

Not that the whole movement is about finding a job. In fact, I think it will be more healthy for industry and students alike if "learn to code" is not a promise for a direct payoff at all, but a push to develop a useful core skill like math, communication, and understanding of science and humanities.

[Joeri]

The necessity of the will to succeed (or rather the will to persist for 10k hours) is probably why it is not something most people are cut out for. In my CS studies, i noticed that most of us started out as pretty shoddy programmers, even those who had been dabbling for a few years, but that the people who improved steadily and got there and the people who didn't improve and dropped out were separated not by skill or talent, but by passion. If you are passionate about the act of programming itself, you can persist, but otherwise the required amount of willpower outstrips people's ability to provide it.

That's why i think it's a good idea to bring as many kids as possible into contact with programming, to find the ones passionate about it. It's also why i think it's a bad idea to push people in a programming course as a path to a job (if they haven't shown an interest in it themselves). I have been the person interviewing graduates of those courses too many times already, and in my experience they're mostly unhireable on serious software projects.