What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)

Books worked great.

One thing to consider: before Stack Overflow (and the internet in general), it was harder to learn about fringe languages but it was also therefore harder for fringe languages to get the kind of business toe-hold that made learning them a financially-valuable expenditure of time.

Try to imagine Ruby on Rails getting the traction it did in the time it did in the absence of a global community that could teach itself Ruby on Rails.

I think the biggest change for me isn't the availability of information on the internet but the decrease in cost. Pretty much any language is available for free now, when I started the only thing you got for free was a BASIC interpreter in the system ROM.

I started in the late 80s. Around the final wave of the "every child must be taught BASIC and programming so they don't get left behind" movement. Sound familiar?

I had the manual that came with my computer and a library that archived copies of Byte and Compute! I mostly re-typed in games and messed around with those.

In the 90's I guess computers were pretty normal to me. So when I wanted to make computer games like the ones I was obsessed with I had an idea of what to do. I had a bit of dosh to get some books of my own... mostly tech manuals that came with limited trial versions of Turbo C. I was a teenager and didn't have a lot of money so I learned how to get around that so I could continue making my cheesy space shooters and pizza delivery games.

I also had an account on local BBSs before the Internet came. Many helpful people there. Fido mail. One BBS even had an NNTP and email service... but I didn't really use that as much as the books because the turn-around for an answer was still pretty slow. It was often much faster to just look it up in a book or try taking a stab at it yourself and figuring out your own solution.

I mostly just kept making things. The Internet just brought an audience for those things beyond my limited circles.

I guess mostly you just had to be motivated and a little clever to figure out what you didn't know and solve the problem with good, old thinking and experimentation.

Books, online tutorials, finding solutions to some obscure problems ("connecting to SQL from Borland C++" etc) was a nightmare. For short period just before Stack Overflow, Experts Exchange and W3Schools had dominated Google results related to programming problems. Personally, I think that one of the motivations why SO was created were the shady practices of EE (how they were trying to trick visitors into paid subscription).

I'm self-taught, and now in my 50s.

I started programming when I was 10, in 1976. In those earliest days of consumer-class computers, there wasn't really a developed market for practical programming books. However, the manuals that came with software or OSes were quite well-written. There were a few magazines, too, like BYTE and Dr. Dobbs Journal, that published source code -- always the best way to learn!

It helped, too, that my dad was a programmer. I learned most of the basics about computer architecture, binary logic, algorithms, etc., from talking with him.

There were local user groups, though most of the folks were enthusiasts, not necessarily programmers.

By the early 80s, I was reading the C manual by K&R and other books on practical programming, and trying things on my home CP/M system (Heathkit H89). If I had problems (and I often did), I simply had to experiment, read more, think more, debug more.

I first got online around 1980 -- via dial-up BBSes, then the early Internet (ARPAnet), and USENET. While you generally couldn't search for answers/code the way you can now, you could browse, and you could certainly ask people who knew, or at least could offer suggestions.

Finally, I think it's been an advantage that for most of my programming life, I've used Unix, and most of the versions I used included source, which is always educational.