Depends on what kind of programming and at what point you're at.
Learning programming today is difficult because of context. Some kids don't even know what a file system is. The idea of an interpreter evaluating a text file doesn't click because what even is a text "file"?
Being an intermediate application developer I would argue is easier than before and possibly the best place to be in your career. Web Development with React and Angular turns front end development into a more complex excel-like experience. It's still programming, obviously, but the tools take a lot of the complexity out of it and a lack of experience has you blissfully ignorant of anti-patterns and a lack of testing.
Back end web developers have the best life (technologically speaking). Complete control of the runtime, any language they want to use and normally pretty straightforward implementations. Security and testing are often overlooked but that's okay.
Senior application developers hold so much context that they are often frustrated by the design decisions of the tools they use. "Why can't we all write web applications with Rust, except using JavaScript modules because Rust modules are terrible, but only once Web Assembly has access to the DOM - actually the web sucks and we should write native applications. I can't wait to retire."
Devops is both harder and easier. It's easier to build a scalable reliable system, but is harder to get started because, while a simple cloud VM is still available, you feel dirty if you haven't provisioned everything using some form of orchestration.
Desktop application developers are in the worst place possible. Microsoft doesn't even know what GUI API it wants to use. No one uses Apple's native Desktop API, Linux is.... anyway (don't flame, I love GTK4). The best option is Electron until everyone is using a single platform.
Mobile development is hard af, there are almost no engineers in the field and you need a PHD just to install Android studio and pick the right Android SDK.
Learning programming today is difficult because of context. Some kids don't even know what a file system is. The idea of an interpreter evaluating a text file doesn't click because what even is a text "file"?
Being an intermediate application developer I would argue is easier than before and possibly the best place to be in your career. Web Development with React and Angular turns front end development into a more complex excel-like experience. It's still programming, obviously, but the tools take a lot of the complexity out of it and a lack of experience has you blissfully ignorant of anti-patterns and a lack of testing.
Back end web developers have the best life (technologically speaking). Complete control of the runtime, any language they want to use and normally pretty straightforward implementations. Security and testing are often overlooked but that's okay.
Senior application developers hold so much context that they are often frustrated by the design decisions of the tools they use. "Why can't we all write web applications with Rust, except using JavaScript modules because Rust modules are terrible, but only once Web Assembly has access to the DOM - actually the web sucks and we should write native applications. I can't wait to retire."
Devops is both harder and easier. It's easier to build a scalable reliable system, but is harder to get started because, while a simple cloud VM is still available, you feel dirty if you haven't provisioned everything using some form of orchestration.
Desktop application developers are in the worst place possible. Microsoft doesn't even know what GUI API it wants to use. No one uses Apple's native Desktop API, Linux is.... anyway (don't flame, I love GTK4). The best option is Electron until everyone is using a single platform.
Mobile development is hard af, there are almost no engineers in the field and you need a PHD just to install Android studio and pick the right Android SDK.
All in all, I love it