In the 8-bit age, you turned on your micro and had instant access to BASIC which you could easily edit line by line. Today, you have to install your SDK, maybe an IDE and learn a language a lot more complicated and deal with enormous APIs.
You can also download .NET and get started right away. I'm sure there are a lot more examples. It has never been easier to start learning how to program.
And yes, today's languages may be a lot more complicated than BASIC, but that doesn't imply they're more difficult to learn.
Need to open a file, write to it and save it? A couple of lines.
Need to parse some badly written HTML to get data out? Include a library and then a few lines of code.
Want to enable table re-ordering client-side in javascript? Include one file and then one line of code.
We're spending less time mucking around with solved problems now.