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

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

#211

Post by badsectoracula »

dragonwriter wrote: post #148
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…

> 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. Often, three or more books: commonly a library reference (which was just what it says, but with a lot more detail than many packages today have with their low-effort, auto-generated API docs), a p…

Note that, FWIW, Free Pascal today comes with the same manuals - a user's guide (telling you how to install and use the compiler, the IDE and the various tools), a programmer's guide (telling you implementation details for the language), a language reference (explaining the language itself, in theory you can make your own compiler from that), a runtime library reference (what the name implies) and a framework reference (reference for the extra libraries that usually come with FPC). Also there is a reference for the documentation generator in case you need to write docs yourself.

https://www.freepascal.org/docs.var

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

#212

Post by downut »

Nobody has mentioned Computer Literacy! It even has a wikipedia page.

That's where I bought huge numbers of programming and theory books in the early 90's working in SV. Better than the Stanford Bookstore. The old store even smelled nice, like a very old library. I so enjoyed spending an hour once a week or so just sampling books.

Anyway, I started out learning basic on a (borrowed) sinclair about 1980, and then learned fortran on a mainframe at GaTech. The way you were taught fortran was to be given lectures on numerical analysis, and then you implemented the algorithms using the fortran manual as a guide (no help from the class). The asocial grumpy nerd behind the counter might occasionally answer a question at 2AM. When Newton's method converged the first time... I was in heaven. We had a fabulous co-op program, and so I learned basic (again, much better) on an HP-9845. Though it was state-of-the-art hardware, the real advantage was that it had a full set of HP manuals, and I got to use it almost full time for a whole summer. And they paid me!

Then next came a PC about 1986. I spent about 15% of my total income for that machine, and never regretted it. What that enabled was a platform for Turbo Pascal, and a little later Turbo C. As others have noted, those were heavenly development environments, with outstanding documentation. I think one of the authors of the documentation was kinda famous for his literary style, but I have forgotten his name. I also in about '88 spent $600 for an 80MB HD. This was about 5% of my then income as a math grad student. Never regretted that either. All of this investment in money and effort might have been entirely wasted, but instead I got my dream job in '89.

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

#213

Post by ashark »

dpcan wrote: post #163

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…

I think it's 3rd party libraries/tools/SaaS, all sitting on top of a much more complicated stack, causing most of the problems. They provided enough of a boost to productivity that you can't justify avoiding them, but mean you swap thinking about and fixing real problems for googling obscure broken shit in these almost-always-terrible libraries et c.

It's the difference between 8 hours, 1 of which is wrestling with dumb broken crap, and 4 hours, 3.5 of which is wrestling with dumb broken crap. The latter is way less fun, very demoralizing, and more mentally draining IMO. But it's almost all one gets to do these days, because you do get done faster with them. A blessing (to productivity) and a curse (to fulfillment/happiness as a developer)

[EDIT] add missing word

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

#216

Post by nitwit005 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #110
gwbas1c wrote: post #88

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,…

Not exactly. The innovation of SO was to allow folks to upvote the best answers to bring them to the top, saving a lot of time. It's true that horrible PHP forums existed before that, but when google took you there the answer was often buried on page 4 of 7, sandwiched between dozens of the "trying to be helpful" posts instructing you to reinstall windows and reboot. Oh, and expert-sexchange---hated that site with a…

The total number of posts used to be so low, the "social" aspects wouldn't have mattered much. Not everyone used to use the internet for that sort of thing (manuals and books), and there are far more people writing software now.

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

#217

Post by Clubber »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88

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,…

Reference books, MSDN CD's, newsgroups, etc. That's what was really alluring about Amazon in the early days: they had the latest computer books. I have a bookshelf that's over 6' high full of old computer books. Probably $5K easy.

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

#218

Post by godshatter »

ilaksh wrote: post #59

I was like 6 or 7 and we had this old Ohio Scientific. I think I was failing to get some really simple BASIC program to run and then started crying and my mom had me call my dad at work. Then we also got a Color Computer 2 which I really liked following the manuals and experimenting with BASIC. That helped a lot. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://... https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=we…

I technically started with access to a TRS-80 Level I, but it was the Color Computer that really started me down the path I'm currently on. It helped that it booted into a BASIC interpreter. I eventually got an assembler cartridge for it, and used it mainly to learn 6809 assembly language after quite a few BASIC programs. Somewhere I found a memory map for the machine, and I was off trying to recreate my favorite games. I think I still have the 6809 book I bought back in the day. I remember a lot of trial and error, and a lot of time spent fiddling with the cassette player to load and save programs.

The mindset at the time was "I have this, what can I do with it?" Now it's more like "I need to do this, which of several ways is easiest/quickest/less hassle/etc."

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

#219

Post by jlg23 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88

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 installed but fetched and extracted just to read the source) was invaluable to help me become a good programmer.

Don't get me wrong: Being able to scan SO/google results for a solution to a problem is important, it's important enough that if you are unable to do so I won't hire you. But: The time saved by constantly referring to SO or google is effectively education skipped. So. if referring to those sites is your MO, I would not hire you either.

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

#220

Post by rsync »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88

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 day is very difficult to accurately and precisely use.

There is no effective and consistent "expert mode" with google - even using the "expert" symbols and keys (like allinsite:) result in "related" and other useless results.

I miss altavista every single day.

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