Books and mailing lists.
What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
11–20 of 290 posts
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#12Books would provide the general guidelines on how to do some stuff. I used a search engine (not sure if google at that time) to decipher the exceptions and it eventually would point me to some random message board. It taught me to RTFM.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#13you want to make us feel old?
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#14Before StackOverflow you could still find your information on forums and newsgroups. Before the Internet took off it was a much different situation. You'd read many books of course, and to fill in the missing gaps you could read magazines or talk to other people at conferences. IT conferences in those days did make much more sense than they do now, imo.
There was a time before forums and newsgroups when all you had was magazines.
For many Dr. Dobb's (http://www.drdobbs.com) was the only real source of programming information they had. Those with more of an academic background had access to the books by Knuth and others, but those were hard to come by in those days. Bookstores didn't carry them, libraries didn't have them, and Amazon didn't exist so you couldn't buy them special-order even if you wanted to.
I learned C from a book and open-source software I could hack away on that was also written in C. I learned C++ from the Borland manuals that came with their compiler. I learned Perl from of the first O'Reilly books ever made. Newsgroups were only so useful, you'd have trouble getting answers to basic questions in a timely manner. Most were more interested in more high-level discussions like how to evolve the language.
If you wanted mentoring you could take your chances on IRC. Most of the time you'd have to endure an unofficial hazing ritual where they'd ignore you, then ridicule you, then finally, if you hadn't run off in disgust, begrudgingly answer some of your questions. Getting a straight answer to a basic problem was pretty much a social engineering problem.
It was only in the late 1990s that programming-specific sites like Perl Monks (http://perlmonks.org) popped up and filled that niche. That was the precursor to sites like Stack Overflow. I'm extremely glad to have been a part of that community where even the dumbest question would be given a straight-forward, non-judgemental answer, in some cases by the guy who literally wrote the book on Perl.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#15Before StackOverflow? Not too bad. Without internet access, though? Much, much harder, or rather, slower - a similar level of information could be obtained but it took phone calls, bus trips to a reference library, etc. Other than that, you just had to figure everything out yourself from the user manuals and experimentation. Of course, back then computers were much simpler and user manuals were much more complete and…
What we did here in Poland (Internet became available to the public in 1996 and then expensive) was to check the library and book shops then buy the worthwhile books. And as usual, run through all examples and then modify and extend them for fun and experiment.
The books were of vastly different quality, the food ones always had properly described algorithms in algol or pseudocode of the day. The RAD ones had plenty of screenshots. Also the books came with disks containing the described programs. It was typically some form of BASIC or Pascal.
Advanced Turbo Pascal books had x86 assembly in them. Old advanced C64 BASIC books had 6052 assembly. And sometimes you could get your hands on an Amiga Rexx book or magazine.
From the more advanced books you really learned how dumb the computers are and how they work internally. This is missing nowadays.
There were also pretty decent magazines with ideas and program printouts.
You had to experiment more and rely on the cookbook less.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#16There was this horrible site called experts-exchange.com (note the hyphen) that dominated search results, but IIRC they made you pay to see the answers.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#17I started with Hypercard and followed up with Borland C++ Builder. In both cases, there was a reference manual and many examples. SDKs (such as the DirectX one) also came with tutorials and sample code. I also bought a book about C++, but it was a very bad one in retrospect, as well as the OpenGL red book.
Not having access to the internet (let alone Stack Overflow) really forced you into a mindset where you were on your own, so you had to take a scientific approach to finding bugs: trying hypotheses, comparing code that worked and code that didn't, reverting changes to a known working state, and so on. I wish it had made me better at writing easily debuggable code, but I was still too young back then, so it mostly made me very good at debugging ugly code (this, and my four-year stint as a programming TA means that my most effective debugging method is staring very hard at code for a minute).
After a while, I managed to get a connection to the internet. I suddenly gained access to a lot more tutorials and online resources. I spent a little while on IRC and on the Gamedev.net forums, but by then it was a lot faster for me to solve my own problems than to post them somewhere and wait for an answer. What I needed then was to unlearn all the bad habits that came from coding on my own, and it took a while (and a few team projects). I was this kind of weird creature who knew the C++ standard by heart and could find subtle errors just by reading C++ code, but who was completely unable to work in a team where everyone wasn't a C++ language lawyer. I got better.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#18There was this horrible site called experts-exchange.com (note the hyphen) that dominated search results, but IIRC they made you pay to see the answers.
You could always scroll down to the bottom of the page where they were uncensored.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#19Does anyone else find quora to be a "fluff" Q&A site? I so much prefer the stackoverflow and friends approach.
I think that is what it is meant to be. Mostly an exchange of opinions and discussions. Stackoverflow happens to be much more formal and precise. So, while a question like "How do I use RxJava primitives with Spring MVC" is better suited for StackOverflow, a question like "Do you believe reactive programming is highly misplaced in most situations" is more quora-ish... or at least that's the way I think of them.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#20There was this horrible site called experts-exchange.com (note the hyphen) that dominated search results, but IIRC they made you pay to see the answers.
Also from the same era was implausibly popular 'dynamic HTML' site Dynamic Drive, where users could copypaste semi-curated JS, which was responsible for some of the worst code ever to be deployed on the internet.
I honestly don't know if it helped move web development forwards or held it back!