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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

#61

Post by adrian_b »

iberator wrote: post #49
adrian_b wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Looking now at the corresponding Wikipedia page, I see that actually there have already been created a few clones, both for Windows and for Linux.

I have not used BRIEF for Windows, so I do not know if it was as good as BRIEF for MS-DOS. Unfortunately, most of the great MS-DOS programs had versions ported to Windows that were quite disappointing.

This allowed Microsoft to create competitive Windows products that grabbed the market from the former MS-DOS market leaders, like with Microsoft Office. Of course, Microsoft cheated in many cases, because its internal developers frequently used Windows OS interfaces that were not yet known to outsiders because they were planned for the next Windows release or interfaces that were undocumented and which remained undocumented, unless someone reverse engineered them.

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

#62

Post by ASalazarMX »

rpdillon wrote: post #20

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 adj…

Different and yet very similar.

Then we used a manual or book to learn how to do things. Later we used search engines. Later we used Stack Overflow. Each change made us a little embarrased because people could think we were just copy-pasting blindly.

Now there is AI, but here a lot of people are actually copy-pasting blindly. We should be using them to learn how to do things, not to actually do the things without supervision.

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

#64

Post by adrian_b »

Regarding autocomplete, while I have first used autocomplete only in 1990 (in the text editor BRIEF), autocomplete had already existed in 1972, in the command line interpreter of the operating system TENEX for DEC PDP-10 (i.e. the equivalent of the UNIX shell).

TENEX is an OS from which many innovations have come.

For instance it is the source of the BSD, then UNIX, "mmap" for creating memory mappings for private memory pages, shared memory pages or memory-mapped files. Also copy-on-write memory comes from TENEX.

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

#65

Post by kypro »

minkeymaniac wrote: post #42
kypro wrote: post #17

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.

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

Oh man, I would have loved to have known about those mailing lists...

I was so young at the time and had no idea where to find info on anything. I was in school so no one I knew knew how to code. All I really had access to was some cracked software and whatever books I could get from school.

Everything was basically trial and error + a lot of trying to reverse engineering any snippet of code I could find online.

I set up a hosting service when I was in my teens and to do that I remember the docs said that I needed to use telnet to communicate from my webserver to my hosting server. Only issue is that I had no idea what this telnet thing was. I was so confused and frustrated for weeks trying to figure out how that worked... It seems so silly now but back then I didn't even know what TCP/IP was and I had never used a terminal... Had to teach myself the basics of networking then figure out how to get it all working programatically.

I often think about how I wish I was born a decade earlier. Computers were such magical things full of discovery when I was growing up in the 90s. When I started my professional career in the late 00s the internet and software had already started to mature and by the early 10s so much of that magic had disappeared.

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