I went to the library and checked out books with code you would type in by hand, like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games
What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
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Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#72it was a lot harder.. I used to go the book stores (remember those?) with a pad and paper and copy down pieces of code that i needed, or, even worse ;) I would actually buy the book. I recently just threw away a bunch of old programming books that I bought for the same reason that I sit on Stack Overflow for half of my day.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#73Books, 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 subscr…
I loved EE's trick of covering content with an easily-removable div.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#74Stack Overflow wasn't around for sooo long. I remember after it first came about and everyone jumped onboard and it's hard to remember how we lived without it, but before then we had Expertsexchange and blogs from various evangelists from companies and we also had this acronym to live by RTFM... which we did, rigorously. When we didn't understand something, we pestered our professors, consulted other books, Google'd for it or jumped on IRC and asked other programmers who would always be quick to reply RTFM... until you'd been around long enough to proven yourself not to ask questions that could've easily been answered with some rudimentary reading. Before the internet though, it was all books and hacking to see what you could figure out on your own... and if you couldn't figure it out on your own, you were pretty much done.
So then StackOverflow came around and none of us have looked back since.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#75My career began here in the mid 80s: http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/iGgAAOSwnHZYmiO0/s-l1600.jpg
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#76In terms of using Stack Overflow to help you track down a problem? The answer, of course, is found in this relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/979/
The next worst is when there are only a handful of search results and the top one is a forum post with replies saying the answer is easily available, and the OP should have used Google first.
The remaining results being archives of that first one.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#77The first six months or so that I used Linux (1998), I only had a winmodem for my parent's cheap tower (333Mhz Celeron I think; the kind you got for free if you signed a 3 year dialup contract). I taught myself to program based on examples from a book and documentation that was included with man pages, program source code, and long-form documentation (often found in -doc packages). The book was good for basic syntax and a couple working examples. Source rpms (my first system was Caldera OpenLinux) provided working example code. The doc packages (and sometimes man pages) had more detailed manuals. I spent a decent amount of time downloading early TLDP (I think LDP at the time) manuals and various zine issues onto floppies at my school. I wrote a ton of really bad code. My local libraries didn't really help much as they mostly contained documentation on Windows/Office/DOS and languages that assumed those (being in middle school, I didn't know anyone at a college/university).
Over time, I saved up and bought a Hayes modem and got online. As I read source code I'd try to incorporate techniques I saw into my programs. Some of these turned out to be bad. You knew they were bad when they made your life more complicated without any stated benefit (or when the benefit was paper thin). This wasn't explicitly stated anywhere (as I remember it), but it sorta revealed itself.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#78it SUCKED. You really had to rtfm (and hope that the fm was good) or depend on google to find the right topic on a given forum (dreamincode, for ex) and hope that that topic didn't devolve into a shouting match over something that had NOTHING to do with your search query. it took much longer to get anything done. Writing code these days is SUPER easy. Write stuff, run or compile it, get an error, search Google for sa…
I disagree. As a software person, I'm constantly dismayed by the quality of information in the surface web. Some days it feels like all but the most esoteric search terms yield so much lowest-common-denominator information useful only to the rank beginner. As in any branch of science or engineering, learning to work from primary sources is an absolutely core skill. Resources like StackOverflow are a crutch at best, a…
and half of he time the information you get from StackOverflow (judging by the comments against them) is abstract because it's written by someone who understands what's going on and is being implemented by someone who doesn't. Cut and paste doesn't work when you're trying to take a conceptual piece of code and use it for an actual implementation. You've actually gotta take a minute to understand what it's doing and apply it in real terms.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#79I actually learnt a lot from the ground up from first principles, which I was lucky to had time for back in the days (like SQL and markup etc.). Unlike today, where everything has to be completed by the end of the day in agile fashion, where I hastily copy/paste from SO.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#80I haven't used SO that much, so it didn't change much for me. I started in 1990. Best resource was the library. University libraries were best. I learned a ton from typing in those BASIC listings in magazines. When I got a modem, I could find some harder to find info on BBSs, Prodigy, or Compuserve. That was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, though. It took like a year or two for me to find a good reference manual on VGA adapters, for example. Finding a txt file like that was like finding treasure. Now I don't have one main resource. Just Google. The main value I get from SO is debates about best practices on specific topics, e.g. stuff like "fastest way to rip a file into an array of structs in .NET".