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

I grew up in the mountains of Southern California. No mentors, nothing other than an 80386 running DOS 5.0 and QBASIC. There was a book on BASIC at the local library which became a staple of my programming education.

I started teaching myself HTML and CSS (and shortly after PHP) in high school, maybe around 2003 or so. At the time I had a computer in my room, but was not allowed to have internet access on it (a wise decision by my parents that I want to implement for my own children to the extent possible these days).

My method of learning was to save web pages to a USB flash drive on an internet-connected computer, and study them, or copy them, or modify them on my computer until I understood and was able to create my own documents. Learning PHP was a similar exercise, augmented by a downloaded copy of PHP's documentation manual.

Stackoverflow definitely made answering questions much quicker, but I also think that it made it so easy to quickly get things working that I lost the practice of having to understand and fix things through deep study.

I was lucky. Our high school system shared a DEC PDP-8. This was in 1974. Each year, Digital equipment would publish a manual. Some years were better than others. Somewhat like a vintage wine. The choice of languages for the PDP-8 were Basic, Fortran, and Focal. It also had a user group called Decus, which shared code - somewhat akin to GitHub. But, I didn't use much of that code, as it usually meant hand entering the source into a teletype. The storage medium was paper tape.

An alternative to the PDP-8 was the one class in writing Cobol on a mainframe. You had to hand write code on a huge ledger sheet, translate that into punched cards, submit a job, and wait a couple days for the result. Most of my coder buddies thought that was a joke.

Instead we stuck with PDP-8. Because the computer was shared by several schools, there was a huge inter-school rivalry. We would hack accounts, and write incendiary messages in the other school's directory, which could only be erased by writing assembly code.

When I went to university, the first computer science courses still used punched cards. The classes were incredibly boring: with PL-1 examples of how to move pieces around a chess board. No AI. In high school, we were already writing chess player programs, multi-user star wars, compression, social engineering, and infinite precision math packages.

So, I was a bit judgmental about the quality of the University courses and missed out on some important lessons. My first language was Basic. So, my code was a meandering mess of spaghetti. It took a years to unlearn that self-inflicted pedagogical brain damage.

Now, with SO + Git, coding feels like assembling flat-packed Ikea furniture.

[UPDATE] grammar

Manuals. Compilers came with comprehensive manuals. When you paid for things like Turbo C++ or Paradox or MS Cobol you got a well edited, indexed and quality printed book that covered the entire language and tools comprehensively. From there you wade into existing code bases, learn by maintaining the work of others, and eventually you originate new work. Along the way you dog-eared the manuals.

The Internet has obviated the need for comprehensive books for the bulk of contemporary programming. I suppose there are obscure enough and/or proprietary platforms that still follow the "comprehensive documentation" approach, but it seems it's possible for widely used tooling to be poorly documented and rely on online forums to fill in the gaps with crowd sourced answers and examples. This makes "mind share" crucial to the usability of a language/platform.

I am sometimes frustrated with the contemporary model, but the old way wasn't a panacea either; just broken differently. If you want a good taste of "what it was like" find the manuals for Turbo C++ 3.0 (1991.) You'll learn things about C/C++ that you've never seen written down anywhere.