Access to a programming environment with good discoverability, and reasonable examples of working code that I could tweak. Back when I learned, examples abounde

Access to a programming environment with good discoverability, and reasonable examples of working code that I could tweak. Back when I learned, examples abounded in print material, and print documentation tended towards complete. (Especially Turbo Pascal's manual) This made it possible to experiment, and get started. Since then it's a matter of repetition, deliberate practice, and raw experience over time. Everything has scaled towards good thanks to Moore's law, the Internet, and GIT. You can't overstate how much better git makes things.