I have a lot of respect for Brin, but it's amazing how wrong that piece is. There's more code being written now than ever before, not just by kids but by all kinds of everyone.
There's an entire sub-culture of collaborative development - github, etc - which would have been impossible with 8-bit micro technology.
Away from that, a lot of non-devs have hacked together simple VBA/AppleScripts. And not a few people with zero experience have produced apps of reasonable quality.
Never mind web pages, including Wordpress sites.
Of course you can't own your hardware any more. But no one ever did. Even if you built a Z80 micro from scratch and burned your own EPROMs for it, you were still stuck with the original instruction set, and you likely had no idea how it worked on the inside. You certainly couldn't hack it to change it.
As someone who made a brief living building custom Z80 controllers and coding in assembler, I'm thrilled by modern dev tools, and the fact that if you have a problem you can almost always find the answer online.
Compare that to my first C programming experience on the Atari ST, where I spent two weeks trying to work out why a library function in the compiler didn't work, only to get a letter - on paper - from the compiler developers saying 'Er, we haven't done that part yet.'
Nobody's arguing that it isn't easier today for the professional, but that doesn't really lower the barrier of entry for the barely interested. Never mind that we simply orders of magnitude more people with computers now, so that even with a drastically lower percentage of people actually starting some kind of dev environment we'll just have to come out on top.
Yes, it's easier to create the good stuff (well, at least web stuff and mobile apps…), but I'd doubt that it's as easy to create silly crap that you're inordinately proud of. That may be nothing more than a simple question/answer loop, but even with that you created something and you understand some basics of how a program operates…
"Why Johnny can't read" was about literacy, not everyone going out to be a journalist or Hemingway. I view Brin's piece in the same light.
But yeah, we really shouldn't get lost too much in nostalgia. Things aren't that bad and projects like the Raspberry Pi show that this subject is tackled today. For me, the lesson to learn from BASIC environments aren't about forcing people to relive that nowadays, but that the programs that resulted out of the very first days with such a computer are interesting for educational purposes.
Your statement: that more code is being written now is mostly due to the fact that there are many more machines. The population of people that have access to computers is much larger now.
If you go back to the 80s, I would wager that the percentage of people that coded (or even dabbled in code) was higher than it is now.
There's an entire sub-culture of collaborative development - github, etc - which would have been impossible with 8-bit micro technology.
Away from that, a lot of non-devs have hacked together simple VBA/AppleScripts. And not a few people with zero experience have produced apps of reasonable quality.
Never mind web pages, including Wordpress sites.
Of course you can't own your hardware any more. But no one ever did. Even if you built a Z80 micro from scratch and burned your own EPROMs for it, you were still stuck with the original instruction set, and you likely had no idea how it worked on the inside. You certainly couldn't hack it to change it.
As someone who made a brief living building custom Z80 controllers and coding in assembler, I'm thrilled by modern dev tools, and the fact that if you have a problem you can almost always find the answer online.
Compare that to my first C programming experience on the Atari ST, where I spent two weeks trying to work out why a library function in the compiler didn't work, only to get a letter - on paper - from the compiler developers saying 'Er, we haven't done that part yet.'