Is it really more accessible? Computers used to boot into a BASIC prompt. Now the devices we most commonly use don’t have any sort of programming environment built in.
You can actually bootstrap a small text editor on mobile browsers using a data: URL and a tiny text editor in html (literally just a form with a text box that will download a file with the contents of the box when you hit submit).
A pain, and not accessible if you don't know the google incantations to figure it out, but doable.
I would say that a higher percentage of the population of any developed nation can go from "I don't know what a computer program looks like" to running print() in a REPL in far less time (the only real measure other than Money, right?) than could be done in the 1980s.
If we're talking about "people with a desktop computer readily at their disposal" then I'll agree that in that subset it may be more difficult today than it was 35 years ago (when computers booted into a BASIC prompt), but only a little bit. However, that subset went from 3% of the population to 97% of the population, greatly increasing the pool in general.
> higher percentage of the population of any developed nation can go from "I don't know what a computer program looks like" to running print() in a REPL in far less time
But I suspect a far smaller percentage of those who can actually do.
