221–230 of 290 posts
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 rig…
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,…
I would say that one of the reasons why php (the language) took off in the early 2000s was because of its excellent docs pages: each doc page for a specific function had a comment section where you could find the actual examples of said function being used, by actual people. Pretty similar to what one can now find on SO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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,…
"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." Programming became easier with altavista, which was an excellent search engine that supported complex, boolean search operators and respected (((multiple) nested) "parens with quotes") ... and other such complexities. Google dumbed this down and to this d…
I'm not sure that this is so much AltaVista versus Google; I remember when Google first came on the scene (or when I first became aware of it?), I found its 'expert' options better than AltaVista's. They have, as you say, become much, much less effective over time, but it seems sadly plausible that the same would have happened to AltaVista. (It does seem that DDG is doing its best to fill in the "search for techies" gap that Google now leaves open, but I don't remember AV well enough to compare them.)
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,…
The real difference: When you found a crappy workaround, you learned . You were frustrated, felt stupid but you learned. You made the same experience every child has to make once: Dont', just fscking don't, touch the hot plate. But, you learned . That's something neither SO-driven nor google-driven development can provide. I firmly believe that every detour I took (mostly FreeBSD userland sources or any port I never…
Surely every educational innovation is greeted with this sort of lament? (I'm a teacher, and I know that, if I listen carefully to myself, the "good old ways" whose loss I am bemoaning are the new-fangled ways of a few years ago.) For example, when programming was done by hand translation to assembler, you learned what every line of code was doing, but now with compilers people don't really understand the invocations …. I'm reminded of the XKCD cartoon tracing back through hundreds of years the lament about how people don't write like they used to do.
Programming is now integration of large volumes of mediocre code written by others. This is only possible because we can find the problems of that code discussed online. Before that capability, there was more reluctance to reuse existing weakly supported code.
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 rig…
Who or what is Hastings?