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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)

#121

Post by EliRivers »

I'm still learning how to programme (getting better every year); Stack Overflow is good for quickly discovering class functions I didn't know about (but would have found by drawing my finger down the class reference if I'd gone that way), and suggestions for dealing with annoying bugs or compilation failures. It all has to be carefully filtered, though; I know I really should double-check everything I read there against a more authoritative source, and examine any algorithms etc for applicability.

But that's not learning programming. That's an occasional source for a neat trick, or a function I didn't know about. I probably try SO a couple of times a week, and generally it's not to learn anything so much as to save myself five minutes digging through a reference manual. For proper learning I just sit down and grind through a book while reimplementing The Secret of Monkey Island in whatever language/style I'm trying to learn.

So for at least some of us, self-learning programming before SO was pretty much the same as now.

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

#122

Post by ska »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #110
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…

They are right - SO is a better version, but the majority of impact came from having the information globally searchable at all. Heck, even searchable USENET indices had a huge impact, pre Web.

And SO still suffers from the same basic problems they all had - "good" answers get stale, information tends to clusters around simple/beginner problems, etc.

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

#125

Post by bdcravens »

suls wrote: post #91

Do people really learn _only_ from SO? I mean sure, it can solve problem at hand but learning a new language or technology? I don't see how it could compete with books in any way

I don't think people learn, but get answers to specific problems. However, I'd say the bulk of your learning throughout your career comes after you "learn" a language.

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

#127

Post by mixmastamyk »

ska wrote: post #122
mixmastamyk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They are right - SO is a better version, but the majority of impact came from having the information globally searchable at all. Heck, even searchable USENET indices had a huge impact, pre Web. And SO still suffers from the same basic problems they all had - "good" answers get stale, information tends to clusters around simple/beginner problems, etc.

There were programmer sites/mailing lists before that where knowledgeable people gathered, and today you can search directly on SO, or use DDG as I do. Also, I used AltaVista before google, and often got answers there, though success was less frequent.

Therefore, at no point in time have I been dependent on google, though it was helpful about five to ten years ago. So, my impression is that SO was the bigger innovation, though YMMV of course.

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

#128

Post by maxxxxx »

I started early 90s and it was a much smaller world. Systems were less complex so there was less to know. Books and manuals were also better so you could read a few books and have a decent understanding from the ground up.

I also believe that until sometime in the 90s most programmers genuinely were interested in computers and didn't just do it to have a good job. So you didn't have to deal with a lot of zealots or clueless people like there are around today.

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

#129

Post by ska »

NB: Stack Overflow can be a very useful resource to answer a certain limited class of problems you run into while programming. By construction, it's a poor resource to learn how to program.

So the short answer is: exactly the same way you self-learn programming now (reading good books & code, practice, and hopefully finding a good mentor or two).

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

#130

Post by EliRivers »

pjc50 wrote: post #117
suls wrote: post #91

Do people really learn _only_ from SO? I mean sure, it can solve problem at hand but learning a new language or technology? I don't see how it could compete with books in any way

Programming language books are and were often very bad. There was a huge industry in giving very detailed step-by-step guides that didn't help the reader to think and had very low information density. Some books were useful to me, but they were "diamonds in the rough". Searchable documentation and result-focused tutorials available these days are usually much better. Although I can't understand the people who want to…

"Although I can't understand the people who want to learn from videos."

I think the appeal must be the very low rate of information transmission. Watching someone typing slowly onto the screen, while saying out loud what they're typing, under the guise of presenting a "tutorial" on how to fetch input from the keyboard ("tutorial" being a very grand word for a slowly presented code listing) is something anyone can keep up with (although probably shouldn't bother).

That said, compare those to things like Casey Muratori who manages to push information at a higher rate doing essentially the same thing, except that he isn't just reading out loud what he's typing. Again, the information density and transmission rate thereof cannot begin to compare to a book, but there is something of a range to be found.

Straying from the topic, I've come around to the conclusion that there are a lot of people who want to be able to do things, but really don't know how to learn. To take on large amounts of new information, to think with it and ally it to what you already know and to adapt it to your purposes, and to do this for an extended time, is a skill like any other; it must be acquired, and exercised. If you don't know how to learn, if you aren't practised in it, a decent textbook might be simply unassailable for you and all you can do is inefficiently monkey-see-monkey-do your way around SO until eventually you've put together enough pieces to start actually building your own understanding.

So I suppose I've come to a second answer to the question; before SO, you either didn't learn at all, or you learned with an efficiency that must seem blisteringly powerful to some kid trying to bootstrap himself by trying to find the answer to "Why does it break when I try to store a string in a single char?" without even knowing that's the question to ask.

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