We’ve come a long way from the 80s and the devices that so many of us started our journey as programmers Charles Miller notes in “Johnny and Jenny Can Code”:

Today, if you’re a teenager with a Mac (insert some other platform into this paragraph if you object to Apple on moral or financial grounds), you can download for free the same tools that professional developers use to write Mac, iPhone and iPad applications. You can read countless free tutorials on how to use them, download reams of sample code for free, and ask for help on forums full of people who may never know you’re a precocious kid.