I've been a developer for 20+ years (traditional CS/EE degree) and i think it's more difficult to be an excellent developer now than it ever has been. The sheer

I've been a developer for 20+ years (traditional CS/EE degree) and i think it's more difficult to be an excellent developer now than it ever has been. The sheer number of DSLs and the rate at which new ones appear and extant ones become less relevant is frightening. sure the barriers to entry to become a novice programmer are far lower compared to 20 years ago, but the flip side of the low entry barrier is a seductive paradigm that can so easily mislead an aspiring developer into thinking they have reached some baseline competence, because they followed a line-by-line tutorial to create a rails app to store and display photos in a cool slideshow with swirling transitions set to music. Compare that learning coding by typing at a REPL to grok the utility and time complexity of data structures. The immediate sense of accomplishment is so much higher in the former. To someone with no prior cs training, there seems little to recommend the difficult path.