Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 290 posts

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

#161

Post by throwanem »

wand3r wrote: post #160
throwanem wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Experts' Exchange, which was basically an earlier version of Stack Overflow Expert Sex Change was garbage , though. If it hadn't been as terrible as it was throughout its life, Stack Overflow wouldn't have taken off nearly as easily or as well as it did. I mean, I like to grouse as much as the next graybeard over how SO has gone downhill - and it has - but it's still miles and miles better than the metaphorical and…

> Expert Sex Change You may want to edit... Edit: Well; that explains why the service didn't take off

And I may not. That was the constant nickname back in the day, occasioned by the fact that their original domain was "expertsexchange.com". They later moved to one with a hyphen, but by then the damage was done.

(Edit to your edit: It did take off! It was the best we had for years. That best was just very, very bad.)

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

#162

Post by ryanmarsh »

In ~1995 I cut enough grass to buy Visual Basic 4. The manual was pretty thick and, it was hard but, I taught myself to program using it. I bought it from a computer store that didn't sell programming books.

Imagine my surprise the first time I walked into a Barnes & Noble.

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

#163

Post by dpcan »

Personally, I don't find learning to program new things as much fun as I did when I was 13-20. I would learn assembly, c++, basic, etc, all from books I got from Hastings or the local computer store.

I didn't know if what I was doing had already been done, I struggled and struggled and struggled until I figured out the right answer, learning how other things worked with every failure.

Now, jumping straight to the right answer eliminates all those other things I learned along the way.

I believe I was a more well-rounded and talented programmer when I was 15 than I am now pushing 40.

Anyway, maybe I just miss those years where I had 100 hours a week to teach myself something new and fun. I could never find the time for that now, and so jumping to the right answer is really my only option.

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

#164

Post by ebbv »

I started teaching myself to program when I was about 10 years old in 1988. Back then I learned from books. I went through books to learn languages and to learn frameworks or big applications (like X Windows.)

As someone else said, Google was the big game changer for learning new languages or skills.

What Stack Overflow has done has made it much easier to find answers to specific problems or questions. I don't feel like you can browse SO and come away learning Swift. But if you do run into a very specific issue you can Google it and quite probably find a solution that's on SO.

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

#165

Post by ryanmarsh »

throwanem wrote: post #161
wand3r wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Expert Sex Change You may want to edit... Edit: Well; that explains why the service didn't take off

And I may not. That was the constant nickname back in the day, occasioned by the fact that their original domain was "expertsexchange.com". They later moved to one with a hyphen, but by then the damage was done. (Edit to your edit: It did take off! It was the best we had for years. That best was just very, very bad.)

Remember joking with colleagues back then about sourceexchange.com and how that sounded out loud.

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

#166

Post by mrweasel »

cnnsucks wrote: post #140

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 obvia…

I started with PHP3, and spend so much time ready the manual. It was/is pretty good, well written and the comments can be pretty helpful.

Most programming language have manuals, and at least those I've used have been pretty good. People just don't want to read manuals, they just want the answer to their current problem.

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

#167

Post by mixmastamyk »

ska wrote: post #137
mixmastamyk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 innovati…

I hate to think what it would mean to be dependent on SO. I think overall we are agreeing. USENET and various sites were a huge jump from the state of things before hand, when your available resources really depended on location. SO is a more useful interface on top of that stuff and easier to access, but the real innovation was made decades earlier.

Yes, though the "cat is out of the bag" now with SO, so it could be replaced if/when it falters.

The next version might implement a versioning strategy, say questions/answers get archived every five years or so.

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

#168

Post by fizixer »

A lot of responses have mentioned usenet so I won't repeat.

However, one very important aspect of usenet was the curated FAQ document of the newsgroups (e.g., a FAQ for comp.lang.c [1]).

The document was maintained by the newsgroup maintainers and would be of very high quality, informative and with it's own unique sense of (geek?) humor. I have pored over pages of such documents and have learned a ton and enjoyed doing it.

Interestingly, I remember reading somewhere that stackoverflow.com was developed to eliminate some of the problems associated with maintaining a usenet newsgroup FAQ, e.g., through automatic and community-driven curation, although at this point, it seems like that kind of feature is either not used or not considered super-important. (well, in a way, that's what it's doing, but the final product is access to the answers through google search, not a single FAQ document).

[1] http://c-faq.com/

[2] a tiny list of comp.* newsgroups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy)

P.S.: Another important resource (in use in the past as well as in the present): irc.freenode.net chatrooms.

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

#169

Post by eropple »

hangonhn wrote: post #144

The QBASIC help "file" was really good for its time. That's basically how I learned. That plus a collection of QBASIC programs the nerds at my school passed around and would occasionally add to. Basically, I would open one of those programs up, run it in QBASIC, and if it is awesome, I would try to figure out how it worked. If I came across something I didn't understand, I would pull up the help from QBASIC. My child…

Oh, man. QBASIC's manuals were fantastic and they set an expectation for documentation when I was, like, 7 that would rapidly be disappointed by basically everything that I touched for years afterwards.

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

#170

Post by xutopia »

I read the source code of web pages to learn how to do HTML, then did the same with Javascript. At the time I was learning plenty of people were blogging about how to do things with computers and I couldn't afford any books so I did it all through blogs and web sites. I remember JScript help manual and Netscape documentation showing me how to do OOP with JS back in the day and that really opened the doors up for me.
Post reply on HN