I graduated from university in 2000. At that time, I had done a bit of coding in Quickbasic/Visual Basic, C/[Visual] C++, Fortran, and Matlab. There was a lot less to learn then (picking up the basics of C, Fortran, Matlab, or Basic could be done in a weekend, and a reasonable proficiency could be achieved within a month or so). Documentation, however, was really sub-par, and there was no Stack Overflow (and finding an answer on the web via search engines like Alta Vista / Infoseek / Yahoo wasn't easy). So while the basics were easy (e.g. code a 100 line program in C/Fortran/Basic), much of the advanced stuff was hard--for example, trying to figure out some user-interface thing in Visual C++ via the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) documentation was a real pain for me. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to use libjpeg to read a jpeg file (I never succeeded).
Now it's 2017. I still code in C/C++ for number crunching stuff, but I've moved to Python for all the high level stuff. It's now a lot easier to do certain things (use Python to read image files, make plots with Matplotlib, interface with SQL / no-SQL databases, or do statistics/machine learning). Building a basic GUI or web interface is generally easier. There's Stack Overflow, plenty of online MOOCs, and countless other places to go on the web for information. On the other hand, there's a lot more to master, and so many competing languages and frameworks/libraries to choose from. Even for a simple language like C, knowing how to optimise it can be difficult to really master (think cache optimizations, #pragma simd, hybrid MPI+Open MP, or compilation/optimisation for NVidia's GPUs or Intel's Xeon Phi). And for any language, if you want to do things properly, unit tests and version control are often standard practice (unlike in 2000).
So I think to become an "expert" in some particular area, it's probably not very different from 2000. On the other hand, if you just "want to get something done", or you want to do a "minimum viable product", for many things, it's going to be considerably easier now. 1000 lines of code will get you a lot farther in 2017 compared to 2000.