If programming is now attracting more mainstream interest as you said, I wonder if the pedagogy of disseminating programming knowledge will change. Will the educators (I can't think of a less formal word for this, but basically refers to anyone that wants to share knowledge, whether pros or amateurs) now approach teaching in a way that does not assume someone has been tinkering with Unix since they were 5, but instead cater to an audience of post-secondary and/or adult learners, including those of us that are career switchers? A section of O'Reilly's materials certainly serves this segment, but will the greater tech community cater to this new group of learners?
It already has, especially with the advent of things like railscasts (screen casts that teach new skills by example,) things like the javascript mentors mailing list and so forth.. i think you are on to something wrt writing for an audience and having that audience change as time goes on. I think the "popularizer" blogs that are basically n00b guides to web tech are increasing in popularity and directly increase the exposure of their curators...
for a direct example, compare the README.md in many GitHub projects to the pages on SourceForge.
We used to take for granted that you'd know how to get cvs, configure make and install for your system (and would understand architecture flags and so forth...) nowadays library authors (who in many ways are the "first educators" for their tech) are putting in more effort to make things as easy as "copy and paste this into your terminal to install."
That all said, it is kind of terrifying how many people are developing networked applications with only the most rudimentary understanding of networking...
