To me the biggest difference between now and then is that the quality of instruction is probably much better now. Not only is the quality better but the number of options is also much higher. Between resources like teamtreehouse, code school, codecademy, youtube and the thousands of pages you can find with google -- people who want to learn to code today have a marked advantage over those who wanted to learn in 1996.
In the end it always comes down to a persons will to succeed. Learning programming is basically a battle to simply keep putting your face in front of the code. The biggest value that resources like teamtreehouse and codecademy offer is that they make it more engaging (read: less painful) and so people are more likely to press on and get to a point where they say "Hey, maybe I can actually be a programmer".
In the end it always comes down to a persons will to succeed. Learning programming is basically a battle to simply keep putting your face in front of the code. The biggest value that resources like teamtreehouse and codecademy offer is that they make it more engaging (read: less painful) and so people are more likely to press on and get to a point where they say "Hey, maybe I can actually be a programmer".