Learning to program is getting harder

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling.

Younger programmers seem to commonly have zero knowledge in this area. If they run into some problem with their environment, they are completely stuck. Oh, they're asked to install a VPN client but it doesn't work and they have to debug it? They're completely blocked. They have no idea how to continue.

For me, I learned these basic computer skills first (because I was obsessed with computers as a child). Then I learned to program.

I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. So of course they don't know anything about how to debug computer problems. This is totally expected.

Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea.

While it could be easier, there are few languages I've ever felt I had to go through extraordinary lengths to get running.

Having the patience to set them up is probably a good indicator for having the patience to learn them. (Or rather, the reverse is probably more true)

It's getting harder because it's become fashionable to shun IDEs that make most of these issues obsolete, and have done so since at least the 90's. It's ridiculous to expect newcomers to a language and/or programming in general to slog through a 20 or 30-step environment setup process. This idea that using an IDE will discourage someone from finding out the more detailed workings of the language, compiler, etc. is nonsense. If anything, immediate progress and reward will encourage new developers to keep going and exploring further, whereas an overly-complicated, tangled mess of setup instructions will just make many people throw their hands up and quit.

Case in point: my first experience with the Delphi IDE in 1996 had me immediately writing a basic text editor without knowing anything about Delphi/Object Pascal at all prior to sitting down with it. Drag, drop, consult the context-sensitive help, write some code, and compile/run, all in the same IDE. It also helped that Delphi shipped with the entire source code to it's RTL and the VCL (Visual Component Library), but that's more important as you get deeper into the language/product.

But those skills have nothing to do with computer science as a field of study - wouldn't they be more useful to teach in general education like K-12?

Like I remember in middle school, we had an elective option between woodshop and CAD. The 'CAD' class was really more about performing simple automation in programs like MS Word/Excel, but that sort of thing is still useful in just about any job these days - not just programming.

I really like the idea of starting to call 'CS' something like 'Informatica' so people might stop looking at the field as just a valuable career skill. Google tells me that there is now a startup called 'Informatica', but that is also what the field is called or translates to in some other countries like the Netherlands; I think https://www.cwi.nl/ could probably claim prior use.

Speaking of, it seems odd to try to use an existing commonplace phrase as a trademark in the industry that the phrase was born from - it seems like it'd be impossible to argue that anyone was infringing - but I guess I'm not a corporate lawyer.

I don't think the experienced engineers earlier referred to learned these things in a CS curriculum.