Having been there and having done that and still being involved, I respectively disagree. It was simpler in virtually all respects. I watched people of all different levels of interest and education (house wives, grad students, math majors, art majors and so on [notice no comp sci---there wasn't such a program]) learn to program in a subset of IBM BAL---this before any of the various micros you mention existed. Later when such things became available I was lucky enough to watch a very much larger audience teach themselves what they needed to know in order to accomplish what they wanted to do. And all of this before the internet had escaped the clutches of DARPA. In most cases, all that was available was the machine and the documentation that came with. In sum, I know what it takes to be creative now and I know what it took then. I would suggest that at best, it might be a draw. My bias would like to say that the good old days were better, but given the richness of today's environment, in fairness I have to come down squarely in the middle.
Back in the day, writing a program that could read in and print a list of numbers from a file, sum them, and potentially even add and remove numbers from the list, was an achievement and amounted to something half-useful. Today, you can do the same thing in a couple of seconds with a spreadsheet. To do something useful with a modern machine, the program needs to be more complex. Having simple incapable machines again wouldn't be enough; they would be too frustrating to use.
As I said in my other reply[1], I suspect it seemed easier out of necessity. Today, you can turn on a computer and it can be useful and provide value without needing to learn to program or how the machine works. Back then, you more or less had to learn about the machine or about programming to really get much value from the computer. Necessity is the mother of invention.
I think I was much more inventive and creative with my programming when I first started out because I didn't know what was possible, so to do the crazy advanced things I wanted to do, I was forced to be creative and try weird and wonderful things and use my computer or programs in ways they weren't really designed for. I learnt a lot because of this. Now I can just reach for an existing solution and not learn a thing, because I now know where to look or what to try.
I'm not sure the raspberry pi can hope to achieve this. In fact, besides the low price point and the fact that they have solder points for general purpose I/O (which I think could be a huge selling point and benefit to learning - physically connecting things to it should help motivate and inspire kids), it is still a complex modern processor running a complex operating system (Ubuntu) and doesn't really have anything other modern computers don't have.
Either way, I'll ask this: Why do you think people found it easier to learn to program back then than it is now?
I think the 80's home computers were objectively much simpler than modern computers. And therefore it was easier to gain deep understanding how it worked and then how stuff can be accomplished with it. On the other hand, modern computers are almost impossible to understand at the same level, but then it is not necessary to do so. We have operating systems and compilers that take care of lots of stuff, and therefore modern computers are easier to use, and probably have gentler learning curve.
The necessity and motivation are also a important factor. If you are doing small stuff (like hello world etc) then the work feels much more compelling when it transforms a "useless piece of plastic" into a "magical box that does awesome stuff". With full featured linux distro, you already have "magical box that does awesome stuff" and your own work doesn't really add anything to it.
The problem is that kids today don't think of a computer as a "magical box that does awesome stuff". Nowadays, computers are just tools. They're not special; they're everywhere, and they can be used to do boring stuff, or useful stuff, but they're definitely not regarded as "magical", any more than a car is, or a TV. This is probably a depressing thought to those of us who remember a different time, but it was inevitable.
