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

I remember downloading open source projects that I found online and combing through their source code to find out how they did something. Back in the mid 2000's I was working on a video game and I would spend hours looking through the games on pygame.org for examples. Painful process.

My anecdotes as someone who started to learn programming around 1992:

"Before Google" is probably what you really mean.

For me: Early on (age 7-14) it was how-to/text/learn-X-Y-days books + man pages and lots of playing with Batch files, GW-BASIC, QBASIC & ASM.

Later on in highschool I was lucky my school had AP programming classes (and a small C-S dept!). So that helped me move from BASIC to VBasic/C/C++. Along the way I picked up vbscript as an sysadm intern and bash playing with early desktop Linux.

When I started college, even though stackoverflow didn't exist, you could certainly now Google things, but results were often not as good and often paywalled. During this time using the same methods above + college classes I picked up: Java/Haskell/Scheme/Prolog.

Later on now firmly in the stackoverflow era I picked up C#/Perl/Go while working, but I did this more like I always had done than the "on-line academy/tutorial" ways people seem to do it now days.

My most recent languages are Go (I have been programming fulltime professionally in it since Go 0.8) and Rust (still learning), but I still have eschewed the "on-line academy/tutorial" way of learning. I guess I don't appreciate a highly curated learning path (when I used text books I tended up use them more as references when stuck or for learning theory).

Stackoverflow is of course something has a full time programmer I might use once or twice a month... but it really only shines (IMHO) for the most superficial of issues (glitches in toolchains etc), if you are going their to learn theory your mileage may vary.. all my opinion of course.

I initially relied on books, then around 2000 joined the small communities online that were popping up. IRC had lots of programmer areas for chatting.

This has been exactly my experience. The only difference is I got books from the local library. I have the same nostalgia for working through Pascal and assembly language books while hunched over an old 386 as a teen. Now, it's much more about how fast I can generate value. Probably speaks equally well to the process of growing up as it does to how learning programming has changed.

I literally wrote hand-written letters to IBM asking questions about BASIC.

Later: Borland Pascal came with a glorious full bookshelf of printed documention, and instant-access context sensitive help within the (console mode) IDE.