Learning to program is getting harder

But what worries me more is the actual deployment of the application you write, which is getting more and more complex quite fast.

It seems, I'm in a rare place, where deployment consists of installing a database and extracting an zip file. There's a script you run and the (intranet) service is ready. Updates work exactly the same.

Sometimes I feel a bit ashamed, when clients watch me extracting a zip file, but then I experience deployments and updates of other so called enterprise systems and am completely baffled by their complexity.

Server provisioning and orchestration. Container managment. In memory caches. Sharded databases with master slave setups. Load balancing with health monitoring and what not... And to manage this mess you need a mix of bash scripts, fiddle with permissions, run terraform which itself runs ansible which deploys some docker containers... And when there's a tiny problem the guys in charge are completely roadblocked for weeks.

I have no idea how some people can live with so many layers of complexity and I fear the day, when I need to dig into this mess, eventually...

Computers, on the other hand, I despise. Every piece of knowledge I have to learn about how a specific computer works, not in the sense of ALUs and registers and whatnot, but in the sense of 'if Windows gets a BSOD it's probably the boot usb you've left plugged in', I hate - and only let into my brain with a great deal of teeth-grinding and swearing.

Fundamentally, computers are interesting devices. Using them, however, is generally horrible. So I can see why people get into programming without really taking an interest on the devices we normally use to program on. I think programming would be an interesting activity if you were just doing it with pen and paper. For me, it's really a shame that the best device we have available for it is some kind of crazy-house compendium of horrors and bizarre compromises.

We also used to have BASIC pre-installed on a lot of different systems, and were able to write a GUI just by writing to the frame buffer directly.

A helloworld was just:

    10 PRINT "Hello, World!"

Today, we don't even have access to an unbuffered get_char by default, and you need to either modify how the shell is running or reach for a heavy library.

I'd say it's still just as easy to get going with those sorts of tools now, and the same goes for many other languages, like Java and C# for example.

That said, I think the question of whether it was easier to start programming then versus now has a more nuanced answer. The kinds of programs people are likely going to want to write—like mobile apps, web apps, and games—are a lot more complex these days than their equivalents were back then. On the other hand, there are boatloads of free tooling and information readily-available to help people through it. On the third hand, there could perhaps be issues of information overload if you go looking without a guide.

So, getting started is one thing, and I can't say for sure whether it's harder now versus then. Of course, that's a slightly different question than whether it was easier to learn programming then versus now. This question is easy for me to answer: of course not, learning it now is just as easy[1] as it's ever been!

[1]: Or hard, if you're of the glass-half-empty persuasion ;)