Of course the coverage by libraries, accessibility of varied example code have improved tremendously, as have version control (es. distributed). But I would sa

Of course the coverage by libraries, accessibility of varied example code have improved tremendously, as have version control (es. distributed). But I would say that the amount of code to put something on the screen, speed of compilation and running (non-cpu bounded) code, quality of debugging tools are all approximately catching up now to the state of the art of 1980: a Smalltalk environment created by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls and friends at Xerox PARC (I've heard LISP workstations were similarly advanced). By their work at VPRI, they still have a few things to invent and for industry to learn. So while I agree barriers have decreased a lot, it is important to remember that the gap between state of the art what is common is also commonly huge in this area. Arguably, _introducing_ people to programming through C++ and R (complex languages with difficult tooling) adds about 30 years worth of barriers right back, and is still common practice in some places.