That's actually a rather good analogy because in the early days of automobiling, you had to know how to fix and maintain a car in order to operate one, either for work or for pleasure. And they were very simple machines that had a rather low barrier to learning how to maintain.
Then later on, as cars got more complex, it became a pleasure to work on them, partly because overcoming the growing barrier was itself rewarding, and it came with a social cache.
Gradually, though, we've come to the point where even the most technically gifted people have to take their car to a mechanic for anything but basic maintenance, and the barrier to being a mechanic is now so high that few people do it as a hobby.
For the automobile, this process took over a century. Personal computers and programming have progressed this entire gamut since I first sat down at a computer in 1977. (A DEC printer terminal in a high school janitor closet, connected to the city hall mainframe. The account I had access to had a program called STARTREK.BAS. You can guess the rest... and remember, it was a printer terminal.)