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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)

#101

Post by amorphid »

nunez wrote: post #54

it 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…

(Not sure if being sarcastic...)

Programming these days is hard, too. The amount of stuff you have to learn seems to continually get bigger and bigger. Like learning to program in pure Java vs. learning Android development. Writing programs in Java feels like programming to me. Writing programs for Android feels like remembering formulas without understanding how they work.

And googling for answers often takes you down the wrong path, or there simply is no answer when you get deep enough into the codez.

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

#102

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I hate quibbling with a question's premise, but dang, this one is whack.

SO does not teach you how to program. It gives you upvoted answers to specific questions people have.

Would you try to become a doctor by reading common questions and upvoted answers to medical issues? Of course not. Sure, after you were a doctor, such game-playing might be useful -- but only as something extra, not as the skill itself.

I was just leading a team two hours ago through some group coding, and we ran into a problem. "Let's Google it!" we all said, and sure enough, other people had the same problem.

But the top three results? They were bogus. The authors didn't understand the error, so the questions they posed were vague and out-of-context. The people answering the problem were just as bad, only some of these wrong answers to wrong questions got quite a few votes! And why not? The internet is a game you play for points.

I was fortunate that I knew the answer before we started. I was just curious to see how it played out.

It did not play out well.

You learn to program by somehow climbing inside of somebody else's head and learning to think like they do while they program There are various ways to do this: read lots of books, watch videos, spend time pairing up in a computer lab on campus. None of them involve playing hit-and-miss Q&A with the internet. Sure, it's fun, and yes, it gives you a bunch of answers to specific problems you didn't have before. But it's got jack shit to do with programming.

Remember those old haunted house games from the 90s? Where you had to thrash around until you finally came up with the magic phrase? Something like "pick up the lamp from the corner". Once you got the phrase right, you could proceed.

Lotta folks think programming is like that. It is not.

In fact, when I look at a lot of the crap that passes for programming, most of it is due to coders on a time budget thrashing around online, copying and pasting whatever they think might work. And they never come back to clean anything up.

Why refactor if your idea of programming is simply making the compiler work and something half-way acceptable appearing in the results? I'd argue that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of people claiming to be programmers today are, in fact, people who aren't afraid of the machine and know how to Google. (And what usually happens to these folks if they are successful is that they end up in corporate jobs where they do less and less programming and become more and more afraid of breaking anything)

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

#103

Post by ChicagoDave »

Learning to code was mostly done by people who naturally gravitated to logic and computers and could solve problems on their own or with the help of a mentor.

I think in the 90's there was a growth in what I call career programmers: people who chose to get into programming because it was "the thing to do", though they didn't have the natural skills or passion for the work. They just worked really hard to learn and found a nitch to fit into...before moving on to management (or getting fired). A lot of these people were the foundation for classroom training and certifications.

I think millennials are a combination of natural skill and passion, but in many cases lack the background of computer science so they do great and terrible things all at once.

I'm mostly self-taught, but having Google and Stack Overflow are really amazing tools. Except when you're asking the wrong question (Google lacks context). Then you need something else, which doesn't exist. Yet.

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

#104

Post by DonHopkins »

jslabovitz wrote: post #69

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,…

I loved Dr. Dobb's Journal too, and I also really looked forward to each delicious issue of Creative Computing as a kid! Like so many others, I read the Adventure source code and typed in the Star Trek source code.

I also loved all the Beagle Bros software and programming tools, and especially their catalogs and ads. (And NO, they were definitely NOT "Brogrammers", they were freaks!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros

http://beagle.applearchives.com/

http://beagle.applearchives.com/Catalogs/Tip_Book_1(Searchab...

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

#105

Post by smhenderson »

Books. Lots and lots of books. And computer shows where you could pick up boxed software (OS, compilers, etc.) for anywhere from 50 - 90% off.

Wasn't until 1995 that I discovered gcc which led to my discovery of GNU/Linux shortly after. Before that I scrimped and saved and waited for trade shows to pick up new books and versions of MS programming tools for DOS, Win 3.1 and then Windows 95. After that I ran a duel boot system to keep learning Windows and start taking advantage of free software. This was also about the time it became easy and affordable for me to be on the internet regularly and the ldp[1] was a great place to go instead of using dead trees.

Before Linux I could not afford access to any type of UNIX system (except maybe Xenix, saw that a lot at shows, was always tempted but never made the plunge). I did not know about *BSD at the time.

[1]http://tldp.org/

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

#106

Post by keypress »

O'Reilly, did a good line of 'Cookbooks', I think these were a result of many forum questions and answers (most likely iteratively refined) compiled into simple 'recipes'.

Something like: How do I join two strings in Foo? They list a few answers, including a suggested one alongside caveats/pros/cons of each. There's a lot of Stackoverflow there. And they always seemed to provide code that was less abstract and more practical than say a 'Learn Foo' manual.

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

#107

Post by corford »

IRC, usenet, "view source", local DIY computer fairs (which were quite a big scene in the UK in the middle nineties) and Microsoft developer books were my route in.

ISPs also used to give you free website hosting and once I'd learnt enough playing with that, I remember doing a website for a family friend's business and ordering my first ever .com domain (from Network Solutions iirc) for something silly like $70 via fax :)

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

#108

Post by gdulli »

moron4hire wrote: post #81

Well, we didn't waste as much time arguing about whether or not a question was on-topic or a duplicate of another, so we had a lot more time to just write code and practice.

Also we didn't spend time competing for fake internet points.

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

#109

Post by mgkimsal »

cartoonfoxes wrote: post #68
nunez wrote: post #54

it 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…

i agree with your disagreement.

I find too often the "it's on SO" responses end up being circular, and people point various descriptions of different problems to the same single answer, which aren't applicable. Just spent way too much time last night dealing with CORS stuff, and kept linking to the same handful of SO threads/answers which were not the problem at all, but at some point in the google/search world, so many things have similar enough keywords that they all congeal together, making it harder to find the 'real' solutions.

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

#110

Post by mixmastamyk »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88

It's really not Stack Overflow that we should be asking about, it's Google. Programming became a lot easier when you could just type a question into Google and it would find that someone asked the same question in some forum or newsgroup. In 2003 Google would always include results in a site called Experts' Exchange, which was basically an earlier version of Stack Overflow. What was different, though, before Google,…

Not exactly. The innovation of SO was to allow folks to upvote the best answers to bring them to the top, saving a lot of time.

It's true that horrible PHP forums existed before that, but when google took you there the answer was often buried on page 4 of 7, sandwiched between dozens of the "trying to be helpful" posts instructing you to reinstall windows and reboot.

Oh, and expert-sexchange---hated that site with a passion, until I realized you could just scroll all the way to the bottom. Think that's when I became aware of the term "dark patterns."

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