In the current day coding is a hobby with few barriers to entry. IDEs (integrated development environments) are free and easy to use, and tutorials on YouTube are easy to come by. Various programming languages and libraries offer different capabilities and have various levels of difficulty in using them. The current programming field is vastly different from its origins starting in the 1800s.
In 1833 Ada Lovelace, a British aristocrat and mathematician, created the first computer program, an algorithm for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, a famed poet. She met Babbage through a mutual friend and worked on an article describing his Analytical Engine and wrote annotations on how the machine could be programmed to compute Bernoulli numbers (sequence of signed rational numbers that can be defined by an exponential generating function). She's quoted saying the Analytical Engine," […] "weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."
In 1939 Alan Turing cracked Nazi Germany's Enigma code machine, he later came up with an idea to create a computer powered by electricity that could run various programs. This idea was incredibly influential for the future of the computer we now use. The next few developments were closer together. In 1949 Assembly language was created to make computers function. In 1952, Autocode, the first language that could be translated into machine code, was created at the University of Manchester. John Backus created FORTRAN in 1957 which is still used in supercomputers. I958 introduced Algol, a base language used for Java and C. In 1959 Dr. Grace Murray Hopper created COBOL, a language used for card transactions and phone calls, and John McCarthy created LISP used for AI research and still used today with Python and Ruby.
In 1964 students created BASIC a program built for students to use without math backgrounds. In 1972 Raymond Boyce and Donald Chamberlain created SQL for IBM used for databases and in the same year Dennis Richie developed C, considered the first high-level programming language.
The 90s were the origins of most of the popular languages we use today such as Python and Visual Basic in 1991, Java and Ruby in 1995, and JavaScript in 1995. A couple of important were created recently such as Google creating Go in 2009 and Apple creating Swift in 2014 to replace C and C++.