41–50 of 290 posts
I'm very glad that learning programming is much easier these days (especially at my job where I can just google most issues now :)).
I was extremely lucky and stumbled across a particular IRC channel where some kind souls took pity on me and patiently answered my questions and gave me advice. I think it's fairly likely I wouldn't be a professional programmer today if I hadn't found that channel / those people. For me at least, there was a certain level of aptitude I needed before I was able to productively seek out knowledge on my own. The range o…
Stackoverflow definitely saves a lot of time, but it doesn't compare to the personalized help from those gurus on IRC. Unfortunately, much harder to find these days.
This is not an issue in SO – if you write a well-formatted and clear question that may also be beneficial to other people, no one is going to look down on you for having 1 reputation point. You can also find reliable answers to common problems, since these posts become very popular and have strong peer review. An answer at the top with a few hundred upvotes is pretty much "copy-paste safe" :-)
The negative side is that people become too lazy and stop bothering with reading long documentation and articles, which can, IMO, help you build the big picture better, in case you can afford the time.
All these stories are reminding me of m first encounter with programming. My Grandpa gave me his $600 Visual Basic (5?) book + software when I was 13 (~15 years ago). He didn't have the registration key, but I naively thought I could get lucky with a 16+ digit code. The first code I tried failed, but I tried changing the last digit and after a couple of tries got it. I didn't know what it was called at the time, but…
Before 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…
My pet hypothesis is that puzzle and turn-based strategy games were much more popular back then because average computer user was much nerdier. Age of Wonders III came out in recent years, and while it has very good production qualities and is a much more advanced strategy than Heroes of Might and Magic or first Civilization games, it never reached its popularity.
But back to programming. Monthly magazines were BIG before internet, and some of them taught programming. For example there would be a game or another interactive program written in BASIC in every issue. When you had the entire source code printed in front of you, it was fairly easy to tinker with it to grant extra lives, etc.
All these stories are reminding me of m first encounter with programming. My Grandpa gave me his $600 Visual Basic (5?) book + software when I was 13 (~15 years ago). He didn't have the registration key, but I naively thought I could get lucky with a 16+ digit code. The first code I tried failed, but I tried changing the last digit and after a couple of tries got it. I didn't know what it was called at the time, but…
you managed to find a collision?
For a while I had a Win95 product key memorised, for the frequent reinstalls that were a feature of pre-7 Windows.
You would visit the relevant bullet board, then post a question and get a response like RTFM. Then spend the afternoon staring into space