171–180 of 290 posts
I learnt back in the BBC Micro era, when I could get books out of the local library. What I didn't have at that time was a computer - my very first programming had to be done on paper until I could get time on the computers at school. Later I got a Spectrum; later still a PC. It was vital that these came with BASIC. Paying for development tools would not have happened. Eventually I acquired pirated copies of Turbo Pa…
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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.
Edit: It was a site that sold pens; I think the alternative pronunciation of their domain name was unintentional.
Edit 2: I think I was wrong. Snopes says they did sell pens but they chose the name intentionally: http://www.snopes.com/business/names/domains.asp. Some other such names from that link: powergenitalia.com, molestationnursery.com, and whorepresents.com.
I think things have changed in ways that will make it harder to learn programming from manuals, or from any other compact source. BASIC and Turbo Pascal had what, maybe no more than 20 keywords, and the capabilities of those packages encompassed everything that could be done on a limited platform such as MS-DOS or Apple II. Expectations were lower: A text display and menus were good enough for a lot of apps -- even successful commercial ones.
Today, I think that programming has gotten harder in some ways. The systems that we have to program, and the tools, have utterly sprawled. I don't even know all of the keywords for the languages that I use today, much less the libraries. I think we have to get used to using systems that we don't fully understand, and how to do so without creating a train wreck. That's more like how the rest of the world lives: A chemist doesn't know every possible compound, or reaction. They learn some solid foundations, and how to approach the vast space of possibilities.
> And finally, there was "reading code."
This is what I did. A lot. And typed-in the code (found in magazines) I didn't understand. The reading code bit is I one of the two* important skill that I don't see exercised/exhibited by a lot of folks who are learning now. Reading lots of different styles of code found in the "wild" i think helps you appreciate more the underlying concepts a lot better instead of focusing on the particular style of you language of choice
* The second is the basic concepts behind "relational algebra" which I also learned by doing using Quattro Pro 2 (long before i knew the name of it) back in the day. I'm not talking about the syntax of SQL but more the modeling of objects/tables and their relationships to each other. Knowing when things should be 1-to-1, 1-to-many or many-to-many seems to be a lost concept sometimes. )
Edit: Quattro Pro 2 is probably not right.. it was a DOS based relational database package similar in features to Microsoft Access. You designed your schema with DOS based forms but could make links and queries between forms using a foreign-key concept.
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…
They still are, and there's a downward pressure on them to be at best mediocre--because that's the audience. I wrote a sample chapter and TOC for a large book publisher a year or so ago and got back feedback from the editor that amounted to "I enjoyed reading this despite not knowing the topic, and I think I have a good grasp on it now, but the prose is too complex for our average reader." (Which implies some really unfortunate stuff about their average reader completely separate from their technical acumen.)
The best books I recall were actually For Dummies books, of all things--well-written, engaging, and conversational. As I recall, Wallace Wang, the author of the ones I remember most vividly, was/is a stand-up comic, and his prose stuck with me twenty years later. About Visual Basic, of all things!
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Remember joking with colleagues back then about sourceexchange.com and how that sounded out loud.
penisland was another famous site from the time with this property. Edit: It was a site that sold pens; I think the alternative pronunciation of their domain name was unintentional. Edit 2: I think I was wrong. Snopes says they did sell pens but they chose the name intentionally: http://www.snopes.com/business/names/domains.asp . Some other such names from that link: powergenitalia.com, molestationnursery.com, and wh…
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'm of similar vintage, although my father was a mainframe technician, so I had some significant on-site expertise to draw on, even over the 6502 and Z-80 boards in our basement. One thing I've noted, now that I teach programming to the Stack Overflow generation is that we had to be much, much better at troubleshooting. Now, we had the advantage of dealing with pretty primitive systems -- 'troubleshooting' often invo…
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penisland was another famous site from the time with this property. Edit: It was a site that sold pens; I think the alternative pronunciation of their domain name was unintentional. Edit 2: I think I was wrong. Snopes says they did sell pens but they chose the name intentionally: http://www.snopes.com/business/names/domains.asp . Some other such names from that link: powergenitalia.com, molestationnursery.com, and wh…
Pen island? What was it supposed to be?
it's also a sign of a thriving developer base with lots of people interested, but i still want a moment of crankyness about basic questions of "how do I _X_ in _Y_?" where Y's documentation is crap
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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 innovati…
Agreed. I remember using https://www.codeproject.com/ a lot, back in the day. The quality was often variable, but being able to search for function-names and see them in use was very useful.
Especially when the only alternative was years-old MFC books in the local library.