With the profit potential becoming more and more obvious the incentives for new people to get into systems programming has been massively increased.

Sure, like all things, 99% of them are going to be garbage but that 1% are gold.

We are still very early.

Also, regarding IDEs, most of them are not much more useful than VI if they don't have solid hyperlinking and symbol indexing databases. I don't like Java but IntelliJ's offering is the strongest in the field. Learning as you go is a lot easier when your editor is helping you learn the shape of the APIs you are using. When Goland provided interface resolution properly it cemented the app as my go-to for development.

Not everyone is as slow and patient as folk like you, and definitely, from my own experience, times were slower and less demanding back when I could have been doing my CS degree. Back then you also had to pay hundreds of dollars for API manuals and sometimes thousands of dollars for a compiler.

Nothing changes the overarching outcome that most who try, will fail. But programming is becoming a more and more important career for people to choose to get into, and like it or not, the masses of never-gonna-make-it are coming.

If you are good, and close to that 1% mark why should you care if a swarm of newbs are gonna get into C++, Go and Rust programming? More the merrier. More tutorials, better courses, and more jobs for those who can't manage to be programmer-entrepreneurs or celebrated geniuses.

Me too. I never had access to a real C compiler until 1998, at age 22. When I was all primed to get into it, it was really hard to find a free language environment to develop native apps on my beloved Amiga. As a consequence I got quite lost for the intervening 15 years or so until I galvanised on this goal of becoming an accomplished programmer around 2016, and got my first opportunity to learn-as-I-work on a bitcoin fork project.

The kids these days have a lot of advantages for gaining entry into the field. When I was a kid, the only route was getting a CS degree, and my school's delightful, socialist administration made sure I was unlikely to cool down after they so totally messed with privileges that were granted prior to the introduction of their social credit scheme.

And buying a compiler back in the 90s to build native apps? In today's prices, it was well over USD$5000 worth of expense, about 4k for the compiler licence and another 1k for the system API manuals.

Kids these days can dive into it and push out web apps and electron native apps in a matter of months if they are motivated. Even with my patchy history I was able to land some serious roles in shitcoins in 2021 due to my extensive Go programming experience from the 3 years prior.