The post title, and your comment, made me wonder - what criteria should we use for considering some period of time as a "golden age" in programming? I definitely agree it should not be the level of compensation, but it could still be any number of things:

* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.

* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.

* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.

* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.

* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.

etc.