To be fair to the electronics - internet made it much much easier too. Ordering physical stuff is a nobrainer now, and you no longer need to go to a library to find pinouts, specs and whatever info you need to wire the things properly.

It's definitely easier, but it's not a no-brainer. The new problem is filtering the signal from the noise. Go try and choose an op-amp, or a microcontroller, or a DAC. There is so much to choose from. Fortunately the internet can help with that too, but it is still a problem.

"Stripped of the fiddliness" - have you ever tried to debug CSS?! :P

Have you ever tried to debug an electronic circuit?

I'd say the "fiddliness" of electronics is orders of magnitude above any high level software development. Turns out you have the wrong resistor? 2 day wait for a new one. One slip of a wire? Chip's blown. 2 day wait for a new one. Weird behaviour? If you don't have an oscilloscope you're completely in the dark. Debugging CSS may be tricky, but there's a suite of tools available which are yours in a few minutes. The power available in free debugging tools is equivalent to a 6 figure rack of electronics equipment.

All of that is true, but it isn't as bad as it once was. You can buy a 100 MHz oscilloscope for ~300 USD now; cheaper than an old used Tek, and better. Resistors are so cheap, buy a kit of them. Since the internet, not only can you get parts cheap, you can get them pretty quickly too; though, I have to admit though, my progress on a weekend project was halted Saturday because I had procrastinated ordering a few parts.

At least for basic electronic circuits, or even simple software projects, the difficulty becomes apparent when you move outside your normal comfort zone. Debugging even simple software is quite vexing to newcomers; I heard someone say it's like a blind person learning to paint portraits (though the one who said it wasn't blind).

>The power available in free debugging tools is equivalent to a 6 figure rack of electronics equipment.

They always charged too much for that crap. Thank goodness for open standards and cheap digital stuff.

I had :(

You say without the "expense". How many resistors could you buy for the price of a decent MacBook Pro?

You don't need a MacBook Pro to program, and in many cases it's useless for some applications (Windows applications). You can get away with a really inexpensive computer, which really lowers that number of resistors. But the important part is that you can just buy one of them, unlike resistors where you will always need to buy more to continue innovating.

You don't NEED a macbook pro to write programs. where as you NEED those resistors to make the thing work. and it truly is INVENTING. You can pretty much do anything with the need of "funding" like the other fields