Software was way simpler back then.
No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#42This 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.
I remember using usenet newsgroups (outlook express anyone :-)
The Wrox books had a mailing list where you could reply or ask questions by email... I used those a lot.. in the beginning to ask and in the end I was answering more and more
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#43The more sophisticated magazines had CRC codes after every line, so you could know where in the code you has mistyped.
I remember enhancing the F-PC visual editor to display the checksum for the current line because I did not have access to whatever method the magazine recommended (maybe OCR with Logitech Scanman?).
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#44My first computer from the 80's had autocomplete: ZX80. Was only BASIC, but needed as there wasn't any way to save...
I had a ZX81. I remember copying hexadecimal lines of code from magazines using the tiny "keyboard". At least the hexadecimal code had checksums on every line, it made it a little easier to spot errors, but had to translate to Z80 machine code to be able to see any code at all! :)
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#45This also marked peak IQ by humans developers...
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#46I did an independent study of C in high school in 2003. I sat at a non-internet-connected terminal in the back of the TechED room and typed examples from the provided book into a very simple editor. Sometimes they compiled and worked. Sometimes they did not work despite being to all appearances character for character the same as the book, and I was often left with no idea why. It was not an entirely unfamiliar exper…
> Sometimes they did not work despite being to all appearances character for character the same as the book, and I was often left with no idea why.
The book may have been wrong - between 2000 and 2005 there were a ton of programming books that were flat out wrong. Many of these were C books.
Just one example: the examples from https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html are full of UB and are almost guaranteed to crash.
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#47Information was so much more scarce back then. Made programming feel like a black art. I remember when I learned about overlays in Turbo Pascal, it felt like I learned a new spell :)
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#48Maybe not 80s, but I vaguely remember visual basic 4 having autocomplete...
In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years. It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boi…
I started a job (moving cities for this new job) in 2004 and found my boss (at that time, a grizzled old veteran of computing) using BRIEF.
I recall him trying to convince me to switch to it a few times, from vim. I never found it as advanced as vim, but I could see the capabilities. I recall being impressed by some macro he had that improved navigation, both within a file and opening new files.
I also recall him being impressed when I showed him vim's ctags commands.
Good times. Pity he was a mean SOB.
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#49Maybe not 80s, but I vaguely remember visual basic 4 having autocomplete...
In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years. It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boi…
You can always recreate it for Windows or Linux. Perfect hobby hehe
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#50The thing that I really liked was that you felt like you were programming for the hardware and not really for an OS. Most systems ran a single program at a time so you pretty much had full control except for interrupts. On DOS TSR (terminate, stay resident) interrupt handlers could also do amazing things.
Knowing a lot about my personal computer (Atari 400 and later Atari ST) made it so easy to do work on embedded systems as a student intern. Without internet, learning about your hardware/ROM was paramount from magazines and word-of-mouth.
Another thing that I learned from that time is how to make designs fast and small. This is a skill that's not really taught, shared, or practiced much and makes a huge positive impact on a codebase keeping it light on abstraction depth and high on flexible capability. Huge improvement to maintainability and extension into unforeseen directions too.