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Just because a kid was programming with bundles interpreted BASIC and POKEing machine code into RAM in 1987 doesn't mean that professionals were. Unlike the ea

Just because a kid was programming with bundles interpreted BASIC and POKEing machine code into RAM in 1987 doesn't mean that professionals were. Unlike the earlier 6502 and z80 machines, the COCO's 6809 CPU was a perfectly fine compilation target for C or Pascal. I never had a COCO so I don't know what was actually available for it, but some friends and I wrote a BCPL back end for 6809 in 1984, for a wire-wrap 2 MHz computer we'd designed ourselves. People using big computers were of course using compiled languages earlier. I was using a native Pascal compiler for the PDP-11 in 1981. But the end of BASIC on microcomputers started in 1984 with the release of the amazing Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M and MS-DOS for $49.95. There had been compilers for the PC before this but they were huge, slow, and cost $500+. The similar in concept Lightspeed Pascal and C for the Mac arrived in 1986. By 1987 I was programming in optimised Pascal compiled to m68k machine code on a machine with a 16 MHz full 32 bit CPU (with FPU) and 4 MB RAM. I had a Unixy command line (MPW), proper debuggers, could link with assembly language etc etc. I'd already been reading about C++ and in late 1988 bought the Zortech C++ compiler to experiment with (in a DOS emulator). Apple had their own C++ for MPW a few months later. Even Perl, which he uses as the example of modern programming, first appeared in 1988. Really, the programming language landscape has changed little since 1987. The main difference is just the capacity and speed of computers, and the rise of the open source Linux OS and much more recently the open source RISC-V instruction set (we haven't seen the full impact yet).

lordnacho 5y ago
> Really, the programming language landscape has changed little since 1987. This is probably true as written, the languages that we know today are similar to what existed back then in the way you tell the computer what to do. Things like functional already existed. Not sure about garbage collection, when did that become a thing? But what's really changed is: - You can download a huge amount of libraries from someone else really easily. - You can ask questions and someone else has already answered, or you will find a language expert and they'll help you. This is almost entirely StackOverflow, I suppose also a number of previous sites that have gotten outcompeted. - Tools for coding are miles better. Intellisense, extensible IDEs, Version control, CI/CD. I remember as a kid in the 90s trying to learn how to code, and as soon as there was a problem, there was no help. I knew zero people who definitely knew the answer and maybe one or two who might know the answer. So after a few blockages, I just gave up. Nowadays I can jump into a new language just with the internet available. I'm pretty sure I could write a simple program in just about any widely known language that's new to me, just with a bit of time. I've done it a few times now, and each time I've seen problems like what I hit as a kid, and overcome them with a bit of searching.
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  Garbage collection is from around 1960, invented for the first Lisp. 1987 is actually around the high-water mark of the entire Lisp world; its the year the Lisp machine market crashed as the AI winter set in.
- wakeupcall 5y ago
  > - Tools for coding are miles better. Intellisense, extensible IDEs, Version control, CI/CD. True, but since projects/libraries were smaller themselves, I think the overall the effort here remained roughly the same. I remember I was directly "diving in" in the header files of the major libraries I was using at the time without too much effort. Doing the same in something like Qt5 today would make my head spin. I agree about the rest. My local library at the time was completely useless, so I went by local bookshops and bought whatever titles they had on the shelves, which (looking back) was usually rather poorly written garbage. The true change for me was the discovery of early amazon, where I could buy the most obscure untranslated technical titles I wanted and get them shipped overseas at reasonable cost. Local bookshops generally didn't give a crap about my requests.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    In 1999, I took home the book that came with the ColdFusion install disks, and learned pretty much the entire language in a week. Now there are Ruby Gem or Node modules with as much or more complexity.
andybp85 5y ago
I wonder if another major change was the rise of the web browser. Making websites do cool things was what really got me into it, after a couple minor forays into things like C++ when I was in grade/high school. Obviously programming for a virtual machine and the concepts in Javascript are nothing new, but having the execution environment and useful programming tools like Firebug a click away for anyone by default seems like it would've been a paradigm shift in piquing the curiosity of people who otherwise would've never thought twice about say what the jvm installed on their machine actually did. This was before my time though, and I could be confusing correlation (explosion in pc/web usage) with causation. (Also I'm kinda jealous of people who were programmers in the 80s, it sounds so cool lol.)
- wiz21c 5y ago
  It was cool. First, most of us were kids, so we looked at computers as tools for expressing our youth, not just programming. Programmers were also not many and hacker culture was everywhere. Also, many of the famous programs/games by that time were done by one person, so as a young kid, you thought : "I can do it too". Then computers were new and their impact on our imagination was tremendous (now everybody has a computer and nobody cares). There was not much to help you to start, so (I don't want to sound elitist, it's not the point), ending up programming was acting like becoming a wiz kid (there were many stories of people who were coding assembly with opcodes using the computer on display at some shop 'cos they couldn't afford it). Then you had Wargames and Tron where the wiz kids were ruling the world. Moreover, EULA were not a thing, you were free to do what you wanted to. So basically, for the teenagers, it was dreams, dreams, dreams. Not because of the technology, but because technology was so primitive. Now, it's different: you have mindblowing technology all of the place, so you can build things like hell. But that came with the price of sophistication: only a handful understand sorting, databases, neural nets technologies... The lego boxes have become fatter.

lordnacho 5y ago

> Really, the programming language landscape has changed little since 1987. This is probably true as written, the languages that we know today are similar to what existed back then in the way you tell the computer what to do. Things like functional already existed. Not sure about garbage collection, when did that become a thing? But what's really changed is: - You can download a huge amount of libraries from someone else really easily. - You can ask questions and someone else has already answered, or you will find a language expert and they'll help you. This is almost entirely StackOverflow, I suppose also a number of previous sites that have gotten outcompeted. - Tools for coding are miles better. Intellisense, extensible IDEs, Version control, CI/CD. I remember as a kid in the 90s trying to learn how to code, and as soon as there was a problem, there was no help. I knew zero people who definitely knew the answer and maybe one or two who might know the answer. So after a few blockages, I just gave up. Nowadays I can jump into a new language just with the internet available. I'm pretty sure I could write a simple program in just about any widely known language that's new to me, just with a bit of time. I've done it a few times now, and each time I've seen problems like what I hit as a kid, and overcome them with a bit of searching.

edflsafoiewq 5y ago
Garbage collection is from around 1960, invented for the first Lisp. 1987 is actually around the high-water mark of the entire Lisp world; its the year the Lisp machine market crashed as the AI winter set in.
wakeupcall 5y ago
> - Tools for coding are miles better. Intellisense, extensible IDEs, Version control, CI/CD. True, but since projects/libraries were smaller themselves, I think the overall the effort here remained roughly the same. I remember I was directly "diving in" in the header files of the major libraries I was using at the time without too much effort. Doing the same in something like Qt5 today would make my head spin. I agree about the rest. My local library at the time was completely useless, so I went by local bookshops and bought whatever titles they had on the shelves, which (looking back) was usually rather poorly written garbage. The true change for me was the discovery of early amazon, where I could buy the most obscure untranslated technical titles I wanted and get them shipped overseas at reasonable cost. Local bookshops generally didn't give a crap about my requests.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  In 1999, I took home the book that came with the ColdFusion install disks, and learned pretty much the entire language in a week. Now there are Ruby Gem or Node modules with as much or more complexity.

andybp85 5y ago

I wonder if another major change was the rise of the web browser. Making websites do cool things was what really got me into it, after a couple minor forays into things like C++ when I was in grade/high school. Obviously programming for a virtual machine and the concepts in Javascript are nothing new, but having the execution environment and useful programming tools like Firebug a click away for anyone by default seems like it would've been a paradigm shift in piquing the curiosity of people who otherwise would've never thought twice about say what the jvm installed on their machine actually did. This was before my time though, and I could be confusing correlation (explosion in pc/web usage) with causation. (Also I'm kinda jealous of people who were programmers in the 80s, it sounds so cool lol.)

wiz21c 5y ago
It was cool. First, most of us were kids, so we looked at computers as tools for expressing our youth, not just programming. Programmers were also not many and hacker culture was everywhere. Also, many of the famous programs/games by that time were done by one person, so as a young kid, you thought : "I can do it too". Then computers were new and their impact on our imagination was tremendous (now everybody has a computer and nobody cares). There was not much to help you to start, so (I don't want to sound elitist, it's not the point), ending up programming was acting like becoming a wiz kid (there were many stories of people who were coding assembly with opcodes using the computer on display at some shop 'cos they couldn't afford it). Then you had Wargames and Tron where the wiz kids were ruling the world. Moreover, EULA were not a thing, you were free to do what you wanted to. So basically, for the teenagers, it was dreams, dreams, dreams. Not because of the technology, but because technology was so primitive. Now, it's different: you have mindblowing technology all of the place, so you can build things like hell. But that came with the price of sophistication: only a handful understand sorting, databases, neural nets technologies... The lego boxes have become fatter.