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No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

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Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#11

Post by prologic »

> But something also got lost along the way, and it's that obligation to read slowly, to understand every line because there was no shortcut available

Not really sure what got "lost" here. But fundamentally nothing has really changed much, except for deeper abstractions, more powerful tools and the cost of "generating" (or producing) code approaching near zero (if you discount the cost of subscriptions to Claude/Codex, etc and the underlying costs of running those st scale).

You still have to understand, and read every line. Although now we just get tools to do so for us. But the understanding is still a requirement.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#12

Post by robrain »

robrain wrote: post #7

Grab BBC Basic manual (supplied with the computer) off the shelf, switch my Model B on (later Master). Within milliseconds a fresh working environment is created (ie a cursor starts flashing next to a “>”) and I’m off to the races. Hope the tape recorder works to save my work every hour or so. Switch on my Epson fx80 to dump hard copy. Simpler, happier times.

Memory error - it was a Seikosha dot matrix I used back then. The FX80 came later.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#13

Post by momentoftop »

robrain wrote: post #7

Grab BBC Basic manual (supplied with the computer) off the shelf, switch my Model B on (later Master). Within milliseconds a fresh working environment is created (ie a cursor starts flashing next to a “>”) and I’m off to the races. Hope the tape recorder works to save my work every hour or so. Switch on my Epson fx80 to dump hard copy. Simpler, happier times.

Those manuals were fantastic. I was still coding on our Beeb in the early 90s and I wanted the assembly manual. My dad ordered it from Acorn but it never arrived. Ended up going to the small claims court to get our money back.

In the late 90s, I wanted to learn x86 assembly and sent an email to Intel asking for their reference manuals. They sent four huge volumes to me for free. I've no idea whether that was a mistake, but I was very grateful.

I still can't believe any of us were able to write programs just from reading books, and I'm not sure to what extent that's even possible today. Even online documentation now seems really crappy compared to those old manuals.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#14

Post by projektfu »

Memories of coding in FoxPro 2.5, with the reference manual on my lap. I wasn't the original programmer, so I had to figure out another guy's copypasta.

There were BBSes back then where you could often find help from others or share code. Not just mail and magazines.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#16

Post by softwaredoug »

Even early 2000s my experience coding was writing code, building it at my PC, copying it to a floppy, carrying it to the device I worked on In the lab, burning the NVRAM with it, rebooting it, and seeing if it worked. Debugging meant manually typing in memory addresses into the keypad to inspect (I had the address of every global var in the system).

For deeply thought intensive tasks like “why did the system crash” I printed out pages of C code and hand-executed code to find places with invalid memory access. For example a null pointer wouldn’t segfault and print a nice stack trace, it’d just overwrite the in memory code itself.

It was laborious but lots of fun. I learned a ton about C and embedded programming

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#17

Post by kypro »

This period latest until the mid 00s. I remember trying to learn Java in the early 00s and it was really hard and I needed a textbook.

No blogs, no SO, no autocomplete, crappy IDEs, no AI, etc...

I miss that difficult focused learning. The smallest successes felt like huge accomplishments.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#19

Post by raychis »

This period lasted quite some time. In the mid 00s it was still like this. I remember writing code in notepad and vim. Version managers like tortoiseSVN were a total game changer when it came to collaborating. I still think learning like this is the best way to truly understand things. Neovim still my favourite IDE.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#20

Post by rpdillon »

Yeah, I'll never forget pirating Turbo Pascal off of AOL in the 90s, going to my local library and taking out a book about Turbo Pascal so I could learn what I could do with it. Ended up coding a program that embedded metadata for all of Rush's songs, their titles, and how long they were, so that you could plan out a mixtape of just Rush's songs. Even allowed you to specify what kind of tape you had, so you could adjust each side, whether it was 45 minutes or 30 minutes, things like that. It was called Rush Mixtape Creator, and I shared the compiled binary on Usenet. Got emails about it as long as six years later asking me to make changes and update it. It was the first actual program I ever distributed. 1995.

Coding was different back then.

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