Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.

BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.

Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.

>most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment

Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.